Behold the Lagoon Nebula, M8, one of the biggest and brightest nebulas in the Northern Hemisphere. It is, unfortunately, only visible for a few hours each night in July and August, and it's low in the sky. However, I trekked out even farther into the desert than usual this weekend and got some very dark skies, so the final picture turned out pretty well.
The Lagoon is an emission nebula, which means there's a star behind it that illuminates the gas cloud. You can see the star at the lower center. This meant that I could break out my narrowband filter, which helped a lot to bring out the details. I was also pleased to see that the filter didn't cause any problems with streaking this time.
my fave so far
Venn's birthday overlaps with today,
https://bsky.app/profile/gregpriest.bsky.social/post/3kywhbbthak2u
well played 😉
Beautiful.
Great shot Kevin. Worth printing and framing for sure! Thanks for the share.
Kevin, that is impressive. Beautiful picture.
Great photo!
If you squint it sort of looks like the album cover for Meatloafs Bat out of Hell.
+1
Worth the effort mr. Drum. Thanks for the share.
Wow. My hat is off. Given the size of my head when it comes to astrophotography, it's a big hat, too.
Very nice job balancing brightness and dim detail, in particular. The tack-sharpness doesn't hurt either!
A round trip of approximately 400 miles. 33 mpg for the Forrester means 12(.12) gallons of gasoline or just shy of 108 kg of CO2.