M8, the Lagoon Again (April 22, 2012)

Back to the Lagoon Nebula.  From my backyard, this nebula is only visible for a couple of hours at a time.  During galaxy season, the 10" is on the mount when it's really too late in the morning to go after another galaxy.  But the Milky Way is coming up over the trees about 3:30 am, and there we find this!  Glowing hydrogen gas provides the red color, and oxygen the blue that whitens up the nebula in the brighter lower middle.  Some blue may also be light reflected from the relatively new nearby stars.

This is also my first imaging run with the Astro-Tech Coma Corrector.  It's taken me a while to fit it in with the camera setup, but it appears to work beautifully.

Telescope: Orion 10" f/4.7 Newtonian and ATCC (eff. at f/5.17)
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9C, 9x5'
Filter: IDAS-LPS2
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

Deep in the Lagoon Nebula, M8 (4-27-2011)

This is the most interesting part of the Lagoon Nebula, M8, in Sagittarius.  The Lagoon Nebula is a large cloud of mostly hydrogen located almost between us and the center of the Milky Way.  It probably lies between 2,700 and 6,000 lights years away.  The cloud shines with the light of ionized gas excited by the bright young stars that have formed out of the nebula itself.  I caught the scene above just as it came out of the trees and collected sub-exposures almost until the nebula moved behind the trees.

Telescope: Orion 10" f/4.7 Newtonian
Camera & Exposure: SXVF-H9C, 17x5'
Coma Corrector: Baader RCC I
Filter: IDAS-LPS2
Guiding: Orion Deluxe OAG, Meade DSI Pro, PHD
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX