Full-sized image (1300 x 1030)
A wide-field view towards a dense region of the Summer Milky Way shows the large Lagoon Nebula (M8) and the smaller Trifid Nebula (M20) to the upper left. The Lagoon is a dense emission nebula, a star-forming region of ionized Hydrogen gas that glows red from the energy of the stars being formed within it. The smaller Trifid has both emission (red) and reflection (blue) portions, and gets it's name from the dark lanes that seperated the emission portion into three sections.
Image details:
Takahashi FS60-C at f/4.4 (with flattener/reducer for FS78)
StarlightXpress HX916 CCD Camera
Astro-Physics AP900GTO German Equatorial Mount
SBIG CFW-8A Color Filter Wheel
An LRGB image, with the Luminance frame being a combination of 120 minutes through a Shuler H-Alpha filter and 20 minutes through a red filter. RGB exposure times were 20:16:18.
Taken in June 2003, at the Shingletown Star Party near Shingletown, California.
Image capture and sequencing was done with MaximDL/CCD, sub-frames were Sigma combined with Russ Croman's Sigma plugin for MaximDL/CCD, and the final LRGB layering, mosaic assembly, and image adjustments were done in PhotoShop 7.0.