The Lagoon and Trifid Nebulas | M8 and M20

            Seen in the constellation Sagittarius, the Lagoon Nebula, and Trifid Nebula shine even against the brilliance of the Milky Way bands they are near. The Lagoon Nebula was discovered before 1654, and later the Trifid Nebula was first observed in 1764. They both are ~5,000 light-years away from us here on Earth. They are both easily observed with the naked eye from dark areas, a pair of binoculars or telescope really brings out the details though!

Shot from my back yard near Taos, New Mexico.

Equipment:
Celestron CGEM Mount
Nikon 500mm f/4 P AI-S - shot at f/5.6
Sony a7RIII (unmodified)
Altair 60mm Guide scope
GPCAM2 Mono Camera

Acquisition:
Taos, NM: my backyard - Bortle 3
26 x 136" for 58 min and 56 sec of exposure time.
5 dark frames
15 flats frames
15 bais frames

Software:
SharpCap
PHD2
PixInsight
Lightroom
Photoshop


My mount was polar aligned with SharpCap I then mounted my a7rIII and adapted Nikon 500mm f/4 P AI-S lens to the top rail of my scope. I used SharpCap to achieve "excellent" polar alignment. I shot ISO 1600, f/5.6 and 136" exposures. I brought the lights/darks/flats/bias frames into PixInsight for stacking and aligning and then used: STF, Cropping, Dynamic Background Extraction, BlurXTerminator, plate solving, color correction, NoiseXTerminator and then the DSO was separated from the stars, and both files processed and stretched separately and then recombined using PixelMath. That file was brought into Lightroom for Metadata and EXIF tags, light post-processing, and cropping to the final  image.
   

Taken on: March 16, 2024

Tags:

DSO

LensTagger

astro

astronomy

astrophotography

autoguide

autoguided

cgem

clestron

deep space object

german equatorial mount

guided

lagoon

m08

m20

messier

messier 08

messier 20

messier 8

nebula

outer space

sony

space

stars

the lagoon nebula

the trifid nebula

tracked

trifid « less

Sets appears in: • Astronomy and Astrophotography • Nikon 500mm f/4 P AI-S

Groups appears in: • Astrophotography - Astronomy - Astrophysics • Manual Focus more » • Amateur Astronomy • astrometry • [UMAMI] • Nikon Prime AI-S • Sony Alpha cameras with manual lenses • Nikkor 500mm AI-P f/4 • Backyard Astrophotography • Old and Manual Focus Lenses • APOD Submissions • Camera Lens Astrophotography • Astrophotography - The Solar System and Beyond • Astrophotography for beginners. • Sony A7 series with manual Nikkor lenses • Astro Imaging • Unhuman « less

Camera: f/5.6, 3536 sec, 500mm (more info) (hide info)

Lens:	Nikon 500mm f/4 P AI-S
Aperture:	f/5.6
Exposure Time:	3536
Focal Length:	500mm
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Adobe Photoshop 25.1 (Macintosh)
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