M8, the Lagoon Nebula

On Saturday, 6/9/12, I traveled about 70 miles to a relative's house in Western Pennsylvania, which has a fairly dark sky.  There was some gradient to the East from Clarion, PA, and a little to the South, which I'm not certain where it was coming from, as there are no towns nearby to the South of the site.  Nevertheless, I was able to take pictures of some nebulae in Sagittarius.  I was actually rather surprised how well the Lagoon Nebula came out with my unmodified Canon T3.

This is the full frame, uncropped image of the nebula:

A cropped version is here:

The image processing is different on the two, and I do believe I did a better job on the full frame version.  This nebula is in an extremely star - rich area of the sky, and is in fact looking almost to the center of the Milky way.  NGC6530 is the pretty open star cluster of bright stars just below and to the left of the bright part of the nebula.

This image was taken with a stack of 30 - 1 minute frames at iso1600 at f/5, 700mm focal length.