Commonly known as the Lagoon Nebula, M8 was discovered in 1654 by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Hodierna, who, like Charles Messier, sought to catalog nebulous objects in the night sky so they would not be mistaken for comets. This star-forming cloud of interstellar gas is located in the constellation Sagittarius and its apparent magnitude of 6 makes it faintly visible to the naked eye in dark skies. The best time to observe M8 is during August.
Located 5,200 light-years from Earth, M8 is home to its own star cluster: NGC 6530 (ee annotated image below). The massive stars embedded within the nebula give off enormous amounts of ultraviolet radiation, ionizing the gas and causing it to shine.
Picture
Equipment
- Astro-Modified Nikon D90
- Intervalometer
- Sigma 300mm f2.8
- Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer
- Sky-Watcher tripod
- Bahintov Mask
Acquisition
- ISO 800, F2.8
- 211 x 1′ subs (total 3.5 hours)
- 150 Darks
- 200 Bias
- 50 Flats
Processing
- Manually stacked in Pixinsight
- DBE
- Background Neutralization + Color Calibration
- Deconvolution
- EZ Denoise
- EZ soft stretch – low aggressiveness
- Starnet on Stride 64
- Pixelmath to create an image with just stars
- Arcsinh strech on starless image
- LocalHistogramEqualization on starless image
- CurvesTransformation on starless image
- DarkStructuresEnhance on starless image
- Arcsinh strech on image with stars
- Pixelmath to combine the images
- EZ star reduction
- Final curves transformtion
- ICC color, resample, annotation.
Annotated Image
