Pink, Gold, and Blue
Image Details:
The Summer Milky Way, or the part we see in the Northern Hemisphere’s Summer, is home to a rich field of yellow stars and dotted with several bright nebula like the ones seen here. The two featured nebula in this photo are Messier Objects 8 and 20. The former is the Lagoon Nebula, seen center-right, and the latter is the Trifid Nebula (M20) is located in the upper-left. These are emission regions which glow from the radiation of the stars within them, and both are located about 5,000 lightyears way. This means the light captured for this photo left these nebulae ~5,000 years ago. Mankind didn’t notice at the time as “we” were occupied with the construction of Stonehenge, unifying Upper and Lower Egypt, and beginning to replace Stone tools with Bronze.
As for the coloring, Hydrogen naturally produces a pale pinkish coloring as it emits both a strong red light combined with weaker bands of deep blue and violet (and more which escape into Ultraviolet territory and are not captured here). The blue coloring, most notably seen in part of the Trifid Nebula, is caused by light scatter and is the same mechanism which causes our sky to appear blue - blue light is simply scattered more than other wavelengths. Some of the cooler hues seen in the bright core of M8 are not necessarily reflected light, though, since the Oxygen (also present) will glow an ocean teal when similarly ionized, leading to a purple-white tone. From a dark sky these star-forming regions are visible to the naked eye as bright grey spots in the sky surrounded by a glitter of pale yellow starlight centered along the band of our Galaxy.
The pale golden glow occupying the bottom half of this shot is simply the Milky Way itself, with this part of the galaxy being dominated by yellow stars and the dust between them (also reflected light, much like the Trifid’s blue coloring). Software detected over 117,000 stars in this shot, and while it may seem an impressive number, it is still only about 0.0000000585% of the Milky Way’s total population (assuming the estimate of 200 Billion stars is accurate)
Equipment:
TS Optics 86mm Petzval (486mm Focal Length F/5.6)
ZWO ASI6200MM-P, Antlia Filters
AstroPhysics Mach2GTO Mount
Autoguiding: Orion 50mm Guidescope + ZWO ASI174MM
Exposures:
Luminance: 102 x 300” (Total: 8h 30m)
Red, Green, Blue: 64, 63, 60 x 300” (Total: 15h 35m)
Misc Details:
Capture Software: N.I.N.A. (capture), PHD2 (guiding)
Processing Software: PixInsight
Taken from: Starfront Observatories, TX, Bortle 1
Capture Dates: 29-31 July, 3, 21-29 August, 2025
