Messier 8 & NGC 6559

Lagoon Nebula Messier 8 and NGC 6559 In the eighteenth century Charles Messier cataloged the bright Lagoon nebula as Messier 8. Both M 8  and NGC 6559 are located in the molecular cloud complex in the  constellation Sagittarius. Modern day astronomers recognize both as active stellar nursery about 5,000 light-years distant, in the direction of the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. Hot stars in the embedded open star cluster NGC 6530 in M 8 power the nebular glow. Remarkable features can be traced through this sharp picture, showing off the lagoon’s filaments of glowing gas and dark dust clouds.  At the nebula’s estimated distance, the picture spans over 60 light-years. NGC 6559 features a green glowing emission nebula of hydrogen, a  reflection nebula of dust, dark absorption nebulas of dust, and the stars that formed from them. The overall image was done with the Planewave DR350 which has a focal length of 1050mm  having a wide field of view and is very fast at f3.The M 8 image was done with a Planewave CDK24 at 3974mm and f6.5.  It is a 9 panel mosaic resulting in incredible detail. The image was done using Sii, Ha, Oiii narrowband filters and using the Hubble palette where sulfur is red, hydrogen is green , and oxygen is blue. The two images were combined in Photoshop 2025. I doubled the scale of the DR350 image using Topaz Giga Pixel and then scaled down the CDK24 image by about 50% to match the scale of the  expanded DR350.