The Triffid and Lagoon Nebulas
This wide field image of two of the famous Messier objects was captured with the Takahashi FSQ-106ED Telescope in the Heaven’s Mirror Observatory in Yass, New South Wales, in Australia.
These nebulosities float in a vast sea of stars in the Sagittarius region of the Milky Way.
The image was processed using Pixinsight and Photoshop from data from three separate observations with the 10 centimeter telescope. The final image was cropped to bring the objects a bit closer and balance the composition.
One of the interesting parts of the process was to remove the stars from the image so that the background nebulosity of dust and gas can be edited and refined without changing the pinpoint rendering of the stars.
These are two objects in the Messier Catalog.The Triffid Nebula above left is catalogued as Messier 20 and the larger Lagoon nebula is catalogued as Messier 8. In the nineteenth century, Charles Messier catalogued over 100 objects that he found while he was hunting for comets. He catalogued these objects as objects that were not comets.
Light, Shadow, Form, and Texture 