M8+M20, greenbbs

M8+M20

M8+M20, greenbbs

M8+M20

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

So, here's the fruit of last night's space photography adventures!

So, the first (more washed out) photo is a single frame of the 45 frames that I took. This shows what one image looks like.

The second is a stack of 40 frames of the same thing, so you can get more depth and detail out of the faint things.

The Lagoon Nebula (M8) is the larger of the 2. It's only one of 2 nebula in the Northern Hemisphere visible to the unaided eye (the other being the Orion Nebula). It's about 4000-6000 light years from Earth. It's found within the constellation of Saggitarius (on the bottom side of the core of the Milky Way when seen from our area). The nebula gets its color from hydrogen ions which glow red. This area of the sky is a giant stellar nursery, and is active in star formation!

The Trifid Nebula (M20) is the smaller of the two (near the top). It gets it's name because if you look closely at it, it appears to be broken into 3 lobes. It lives about 5000 light years away, and is also a stellar nursery.

All the other stars you see are part of the dense core of the Milky Way (our home), and are tightly packed. If you went far enough to the country, you'd see this as a glowing "cloud" in the night sky.

Nerdy Tech Details:

Sony A6000

ISO 800

90 seconds x 40 exposures (1 hour total time)

Sigma 70-200mm f2.8 lens, @f4. Focal Length at 200mm

Tracked on a Celestron AVX mount

Put together with PixInsight

Edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Comments

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M8+M20, greenbbs