I haven't done the Triffid and Lagoon nebulae in years, so as this is the season for them, I decided to see if my improved skills could create something better than I was able to before. Unlike most of my images, this one is in visual RGB light, and the colors are approximately what you would see if your eyes were sensitive enough and you were only 100 or so light-years from the cloud.
On the left, The Trifid, aka Messier 20 or M20 and NGC 6514, like the neighboring Lagoon Nebula, is northwest of the bright star Sagittarius and about 4,100 light-years from Earth. The luminescence results from a combination of Hydrogen-alpha light emitted by highly excited hydrogen atoms (red) and reflection from the same approximately 3,000 newly born bright blue stars (value). The dividing black lines are dark molecular clouds between us and the emitting cloud (nebula). Hundreds of unborn stars within the cloud are contributing to the energy of their older siblings, producing ultraviolet energy and exciting the hydrogen.
The much larger Lagoon Nebula (M8 or NGC 6523) is an emitting area in the same immense cloud as the Triffid. It is being excited by the star cluster NGC 6530 at its center. Around the edges, pockets of cleared space can be seen where newborn stars have blown back the clouds from which they were born, compressing them into a far denser concentration. That compression then leads to the formation of even more stars.
The image data was captured remotely using a telescope similar to the one I use here in Salado at the iTelescope Siding Springs observatory in New South Wales, Australia. It is composed of eight ten-minute exposures through a cooled color camera. I chose to capture the data remotely because it is far less expensive and time-consuming to pay for time on a telescope on a mountain in the dry desert of Australia than to travel to a remote desert site in West Texas and hope for good weather.