The Lagoon Nebula M8 with a southern hemisphere 'flavour'. Photographed by Ian Wallis with a Meade LX-50 10" SC telescope at f/10 on 35mm Kodak EGP-400 negative film at the Schmidt-Cassegrain focus (sometimes mistaken for the "prime focus"), exposed 7 minutes. This image was taken in July 1999 from a suburban location in Perth, Western Australia. Visual limiting magnitude was about 5.2.

The giant star-forming H II region, the Lagoon Nebula M8, as photographed by Matt BenDaniel on May 24, 2001 from Pearce, Arizona. Matt used an autoguided Astro-Physics 130 EDF f/6.7 refractor to obtain this color photograph, a 90-minutes exposure on hypered Kodak PPF 400 film.

Note the many details in the nebula, and the newly formed open star cluster NGC 6530 in the left (Eastern) part of the nebula. This image was cropped from a larger image of the whole region including M8, M20 and M21.

The Hourglass Nebula region in the Lagoon Nebula M8, as photographed by Richard Crisp with a Celestron C14 imaging scope at f/11 (F=3910mm) and CCD camera. This unique picture is a composite of images taken through narrow filters, showing light emitted in the lines of the elements Sulphur, Hydrogen and Oxygen: [SII] = Red, H alpha = Green, [OIII] = Blue. The same color mapping was used for the Hubble Space Telescope images of M8. The H alpha image was taken on August 19, 2003 at Fremont Peak State Park near San Juan Bautista, California, the [OIII] and [SII] images were taken August 22, 2003 at Plettstone, California (near Yosemite National Park); three exposures of ten minutes through each filter (so a total exposure time of 1.5 hours). A lot of gorgeous detail can be seen in this image.

Last Modification: October 1, 1999