Messier 20, AKA the Triffid Nebula is one of the iconic deep sky objects. Pretty much everyone, even those without a stitch of interest in astronomy have seen pictures of it. It has been on my bucket list since before I started in astrophotography. I’d been holding off on it because I didn’tike I could do I justice but one of my teammates suggested the target and we decided to get data on all seven filters once we established there was good signal on all of them. We weren’t sure how we were going to use them all and I suspect each of us will choose a different path but this one was mine: I used the luminance filter combined with fractions of each narrowband filter to make a “combo luminance” and combined that with the RGB. That kept the natural colors but caught some of the narrowband detail, especially in the background but allowed the reflection nebula that is only visible in broadband to still take part. Overall I’m thrilled with how this turned out!

As to the nebula itself, it’s in Sagittarius, not far from Messier 8, the Lagoon Nebula. The bright pink is an emission nebula but the wispier blue stuff to the right is a reflection nebula. I can’t think of another spot in the night sky that looks like this. It is about 4,100 light. years away and is about the same apparent size as the full moon (though I suspect that is referring to the emission portion. Combined with the reflection portion it is a bit larger than the full moon.

This is 64h 45m of HaSOLRGB data. You can find all the technical details at astrobin.