Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Sagittarius (Sgr)  ·  Contains:  M 20  ·  NGC 6514  ·  Trifid nebula
M20 Trifid Nebula, Barry Brook
M20 Trifid Nebula
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M20 Trifid Nebula

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Description

A fairly long integration of the reflection (blue) and emission (red) nebula of M20, the fabulous 'Trifid Nebula'. This is a large HII region in Sagittarius, located about 5,200 light years away.

The image was captured a few months ago from my Adelaide surburban backyard, using an Orion ED80T CT apo astrograph (at f/4.8), mounted on an AZ-EQ6. The CCD camera was an Orion StarShoot G3 mono, guided with PHD2 using a think OAG and an ASI120MM-S guide camera. It's taken me a while to dedicate the time required to do the processing!

The image is composed of the following:

Lum = 56 x 5 min

Ha = 18 x 10 min

R, G & B = 56 x 5 min for each channel

Total integration time of 21.7 hours.

I used the Ha data to really make the central emission region stand out above the background. I developed a synthetic luminance channel by blending an exposure-based weighting of the L, Ha, R, G and B luminances. All subs were unbinned.

Captured from late Aug to early Sept 2014, as weather permitted. Pre-processed with flats (light box), bad pixel map (based on 70 darks) and bias in Nebulosity. Aligned and Drizzled in DSS. Post-processed in StarTools.

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M20 Trifid Nebula, Barry Brook