Sagittarius is a rich portion of the night sky - facing more towards the center of our Milky Way than away from it.
For this imaging project, I decided to do a group shot rather than focus on a single target.
So I captured about a 2 x 2.5 degree area that includes Messier 8 (The Lagoon Nebula), Messier 20 ( The Trifid Nebula and Messier 21 - an Open Cluster known as Webb's Cross.
Also included is another nebula that looks to me like the paw of an animal, or perhaps a human forearm and fist. This is primarily associated with IC 4685, but as you can see in the annotated image, this nebula includes many catalog entries.
This image resulted from about 4 hours of HaRGB data integration, taken on my Askar FRA400 Astrograph and the ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro camera. This was mounted on my IOptron CEM 26 mount.
The framing was accomplished using Sequence Generator Pro's Framing and Mosaic Wizard, and the camera was rotated by hand and verified via plate solve. This composition offers plenty of eye candy while highlighting well-known and less well-known targets.
In the end, I used the Ha data and a synthetic luminance image created with ImageIntegration to process the image. This gave me the best balance between Ha Nebula definition and bright nebula detail from the Luminance image.
The story behind this image, as well as a complete processing walkthrough can be seen at:
https://cosgrovescosmos.com/projects/m8-m20-m21Thanks for looking! Let me know if you have any questions.
P.S. This blog entry has my third attempt at providing a video overview. My filming and editing skills have increased a tiny bit - but you are still stuck with me talking in it, so keep your expectations extremely low and you will not be disappointed!
Pat
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