Trifid Nebula - Messier 20 (Bruce Rohrlach)

Celestial hemisphere: Southern · Constellation: Sagittarius (Sgr) · Contains: M 20 · NGC 6514 · Trifid nebula

Trifid Nebula - Messier 20, Bruce Rohrlach

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Trifid Nebula - Messier 20

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Trifid Nebula - Messier 20

A test to see how well collimated I am after removing the mirrors for cleaning then re-installing the mirrors in the Newtonian OTA. Not very well collimated it turns out. Or I have a tilt issue. So as pixel peepers can see I have a veritable donut factory happening on the left side of both images with the stars not forming nice pin-pricks but small donuts. The stars on the right side of the Trifid Nebula are a bit better. Always something to troubleshoot in this game.

This is 3 hours exposure on the Trifid Nebula using RGB filters with an ASI1600mm Pro. So 240 x 15 second subframes for each of the Red, Green and Blue filters (=720 sub-frames in total) from Lysterfield, Melbourne. The edges of the Trifid Nebula need more exposure time to bring them out better.

The Trifid Nebula (in Sagittarius) is an unusual object, being a combination of an open star cluster, an emission nebula (the pink part), a reflection nebula (the fainter blue part) plus a dark nebula which comprise interstellar dust grains that block light and produce the trifurcated pattern within the pink emission nebula (and hence the name Trifid nebula).

These colourful gas clouds (imaged in true colour here) are the spawning ground of stars and their planetary systems.

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	2785442
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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Trifid Nebula - Messier 20

Trifid Nebula - Messier 20

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