I was very pleased with this image of M8 - the beautiful Lagoon nebula.
M8 was the first DSO I ever photographed, one I was very pleased to revisit for the first time since I took this
original image a few years ago.
I captured only 30 subs, but conditions were very good, with clear crisp skies and no wind.
I dithered all 30 subs, and stacked them using PixInsight. The subs were slightly under-sampled because the pixel size of the camera is a bit large for the 600mm focal length of the 80PHQ, so I drizzled the integration to recover the fine detail. I tightened up the star profiles slightly using BlurX, reduced the background noise using NoiseX, and applied some minor tone stretching to the final image using Affinity Photo.
The 80-PHQ is proving to be an extremely capable telescope, and is very easy to manage on the equally capable AM5 mount.
I like to call this target the
Pearl nebula, because of its striking resemblance to the shell of an oyster, displaying a luminescent pearl.
Of particular interest in this image are the clouds of dust and gas that form a tornado-like structure around the hot O-type star at the centre of the nebula, several Bok globules including B88, B89 and B296, and NGC6530, an open cluster of young stars between the core and the bright OII regions to the right.
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