I’ve been wanting to try this target for years, but I’ve been latitudinally challenged. Even at Death Valley, this target only get about 29 degrees above the horizon. But the very dry air and Bortle 1 made it achievable.

I know this area has a lot of interesting colors besides the usual Red/Pink and Blue, so I wanted to go only RGB without luminance or narrowband to maximize the subtle purples and cyans and brown dust that are found throughout. While the starless rendition is stunning in it’s own right, the golden sea of the Milky Way stars it the rightful way to show this area. However, I’m including a few starless samples which show off the colors.

Particularly on the Trifid, the obscuring bands tend to be represented in shades of gray, so I wanted to show them ad the brown dust knots in front with the Red/pink rose surrounded by a blue/purple cocoon.

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I captured extra blue so show off the faint cyan curtain smearing downthe front of the lagoon and the really colorful scalloped “tail” of the lagoon which itself houses a pink scallop shell with cyan ribs.

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And not to be outdone by the Eagle Nebula, The Lagoon has it’s own pillars of creation

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