English: Messier Objects: M8

taken by rbruels

From NASA's APOD site:

The large majestic en:Lagoon Nebula is home for many young stars and hot gas. The Lagoon Nebula is so large and bright it can be seen without a telescope. Formed only several million years ago in the nebula is the open clusterknown as NGC 6530, whose young stars show their high temperature by their blue glow. The nebula, also known as M8 and NGC 6523, is named "Lagoon" for the band of dust seen to the left of the open cluster's center. A bright knot of gas and dust in the nebula's center is known as the Hourglass Nebula. Star formation continues in the Lagoon Nebula as witnessed by the many globules that exist there.

Ryan's Summary

I took this image with the 24" telescope at the University of Colorado's Sommers-Bausch Observatory. It was taken on an f/3.4 CCD imaging system. The filters were a stock set of RVB filters available on the 24" imaging system and were later processed by Adobe Photoshop. M8 rvb.jpg

(note to meta-editors: this image did NOT come from NASA as previously stated. See above.)

This image has been released by its photographer under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. The work must be attributed to its creator (Ryan Bruels) but is otherwise released for alteration or transformation provided the resulting work is released under a similar license.