We went to Costa Rica on vacation a few weeks ago, which was fun. It’s the rainy season there so I wasn’t banking on clear skies, but the idea of Magellanic Clouds, Crux, and other delights was enough to make me haul at least a camera and a tracker. I considered improving the barn door tracker my dad gave me a while back, but thanks to generous family members (Skip/Bruce/Lynn) I had birthday funds to leverage the purchase of a very portable iOptron SkyTracker. I’d had my eye on it for months, and Costa Rica was the perfect excuse.
Thirteen cloudy nights later it was a well traveled but unused mount. Anyway, it turns out the Magellanic Clouds were in the daytime and the moon was full, so no big loss. Sour skies.
The following week I had a conference in San Diego, so I put some more miles on it. This time the moon was near new and a short drive east had me spitting distance from the border in very dark skies. Here is an image of the center of our galaxy near Sagittarius. Setting up the shot, I could see the Lagoon Nebula and put it near the center of the frame.
My first thought on looking at the picture when I got home was “oh yeah, that’s where the Trifid Nebula is.” I used to have a poster of the Trifid on my wall when I was a kid (after a trip to Kitt Peak), but I hadn’t captured it myself until now. Of course, this one is smaller. Here’s an annotated version of the image that will help you find it, and the rest of the goodies in this rich field. Click on the picture to get the full size image.
The above images are 20 3min frames stacked in Deep Sky Stacker. It brings out the Milky Way nicely, but washes out the nebulae a bit. Here I stacked 10 frames manually in Photoshop and cropped out the jewels of the frame:
Scott's Sky Shots 