M17 - The Swan

It's upside-down here so looks more like a swan than in the sky, where it can be seen visually, with a big enough telescope, as a fairly bright and recognisable shape. It was taken with an M25C and Vixen VMC260L with a Meade 6.3 focal reducer in the optical train to widen the field of view.
Taken on the 16th of June this year, this object is very low in the south so fraught with light pollution and thick air introducing diffraction problems etc. But shortening the focal length eases many difficulties, as does an IDAS LPS filter.
The exposure was 7x300sec, 25 dome flats were taken too, but no darks, and it was processed in AstroArt and Photoshop CS2.