Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

The photo below shows Lagoon nebula (Messier object 8), the Triffid nebula (Messier object 20) to the left of the Lagoon nebula, the open cluster Messier object 21 down and to the left of the Triffid nebula and the globular star cluster NGC 6544 in the lower right hand corner. To make this image I took multiple 30 second images with the canon 500mm F-4.0 lens using a canon 5D Mark4 DSLR camera with the ISO set to 1600. The camera was piggy backed on my APO refractor which was using as the guide scope. The telescope mount used was the Losemandy G11. I processed the images with the freeware program Deep Sky stacker to stack the best 20 images and then finish the image with standard photo software. The picture was cropped just a bit, however the lower right hand corner was in the original image and shows that the canon lens does a great job all the way to the edge of the field. With most lens you will start to see a bit of star flaring at the edge of the field. All comments and suggestions are welcome. For some reason on my browser the initial download looks correct however if I zoom in then back out the image seems to over state the stars?

This effect of the browser on the stars only seems to happen with MS edge, chrome doesn't have this issue.

(Download)

PixelStan77 Loc: Vermont/Chicago

Thanks for sharing your Lagoon Nebula image and technique used for capture. I am still trying to get the Milky Way.

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Your very welcome. One thing I found is that the camera default sharpening settings cause some of the brighter stars to have a dark halo around them. This only becomes noticeable in nebula's or when the background isn't really dark. To correct for this I added a customer setting that I now use for celestial pictures that reduces the fineness and sharpening and then control these in the final image during processing. If you have any questions feel free to ask. Thanks for looking at the photo.

Retired CPO Loc: Travel full time in an RV

Short of using the Hubble telescope, I don't know how you would produce a better image. Very nice!