I’m very pleased with this one!! This project was nearly 2 months in the making, but it was worth it.
In my opinion, the Trifid is one of the very prettiest objects in the sky, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s full of rich colors and fine details in the dust lanes and gaseous structures.
I was blown away by the result I got; the image was stunning! I was especially pleased with the details in the dark dust lanes, the range of colors in the emission and reflection parts of the nebula, and the overall 3D appearance of the puffy clouds. Then, another surprise. While examining the image in detail I noticed a tiny but clear straight line jutting out from one of the clouds near the bottom. Was that an artifact, or could it be… ? I checked the Hubble archive and found what I was looking for – a high resolution close-up of the region in question and sure enough, it was an actual stellar jet! This was the first time I had captured anything like this and it was the icing on the cake:
The jet itself is quite interesting:
“A stellar jet [the thin, wispy object pointing to the upper left] protrudes from the head of a dense cloud and extends three-quarters of a light-year into the nebula. The jet’s source is a very young stellar object that lies buried within the cloud. Jets such as this are the exhaust gases of star formation. Radiation from the massive star at the center of the nebula is making the gas in the jet glow, just as it causes the rest of the nebula to glow.
The jet in the Trifid is a “ticker tape,” telling the history of one particular young stellar object that is continuing to grow as its gravity draws in gas from its surroundings. But this particular ticker tape will not run for much longer. Within the next 10,000 years the glare from the central, massive star will continue to erode the nebula, overrunning the forming star, and bringing its growth to an abrupt and possibly premature end.”
– Hartmut Frommert & Christine Kronberg (SEDS)
The shorter spike pointed about 45° clockwise from the jet is a knot of denser material resisting the stellar wind “blowing” the less dense material around it.
This is certainly my best astronomical image so far.
[32″ RC f/7 with SBIG STX KAF-16803 16 megapixel camera @ Mount Lemmon SkyCenter, Arizona]