Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Sagittarius (Sgr)  ·  Contains:  7 Sgr  ·  9 Sgr  ·  B296  ·  B88  ·  B89  ·  Hourglass nebula  ·  Lagoon nebula  ·  M 8  ·  NGC 6523  ·  NGC 6526  ·  NGC 6530  ·  The star 7Sgr  ·  The star 9Sgr
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The Lagoon Nebula. APOD April 25, 2019, Eric Coles (coles44)
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The Lagoon Nebula. APOD April 25, 2019

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
The Lagoon Nebula. APOD April 25, 2019, Eric Coles (coles44)
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The Lagoon Nebula. APOD April 25, 2019

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Description

This is a little bit different submission for me. Let me explain. I have been exploring the MAST space telescope archive. The objective was to combine some of that data with some of my own. I landed on a four-panel capture from the Pan-STARRS GigaPixelCamera data archive.



The first tasks was to assign the those filters to RGB (apparently HST does not do RGB filters) and do the four-panel mosaic. Joe DePasquale was kind enough to send me the rough nm equivalent of each of the filters. Based on that information, the following assignment were made for the initial mapped image: 960 nm = Red, 752 nm = Green and 480 nm = Blue. That gave a “naturalistic” mapped star field and the ability to make the four-panel mosaic. The stars looked fine but the emission nebula had an odd color and was somewhat weak. That’s where my narrowband Lagoon Nebula data came in.



Next I took my narrowband Lagoon Nebula SHO images that I acquired when working with Martin Pugh and registered them to the mapped mosaic image from the MAST archive. Using my starless registered HOS images, I lightened Lagoon RGB channels as follows: H to red, O to blue and S to green. To be more specific, I took the H starless image, converted it to RGB and blackened the G and B channels. Then that red image was used it as a lightening layer for the Lagoon Nebula mosaic. Next the same was done for O with a blue layer and S with a green layer. Now I had an image combining the Pan-STARRS data with my data to produce something completely different. And the result was that the emission nebula itself (not the stars) was brighter and redder from the H data, with some nice accents from the O and S starless images. That produced the final image that you see.

Working with the Pan-STARRS data was an interesting and sometime challenging experience. But in the end, I was pleased to be able to add some color and interest with some of our own image data.



This image could not have been produced without the advice and guidance of Joe DePasquale of the Space Telescope Science Institute. He guided me on how to open the FITS files in the archive, the filter nm approximations and what data might be most interesting to work with. Thank you Joe.

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The Lagoon Nebula. APOD April 25, 2019, Eric Coles (coles44)

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Narrowband imaging