M8, M20, and More…

Another shot from Cherry Springs State Park, this image has a few flaws starting with a failure on my part to check the focus very well. It doesn’t show in this 25% scaled down image, but yeah, it was out of focus.

With a background near the galactic core in Sagittarius, these almost get lost in the rich starfield background. M8, near the top center, includes both a reddish glow from hydrogen alpha as well as the bluish color from starlight reflecting off cold dust. M20 has an embedded star cluster, NGC 6530 which is visible slightly left of the densest part of the nebula. I really need to create an overlay to itemize all the objects in this view.

Exposure was 19 x 180 sec for a total of 57 minutes. In addition to being out of focus, this would be better imaged during June or July when there is more time to capture the images before it sinks too low toward the horizon. And it needs more like 2-3 hours of total exposure to improve the signal-to-noise levels to bring out the fainter bits of the nebulosity, including IC 4685 which is the reddish smear left and slightly above M20.