Here we have several objects in the southern Milky Way, nestled between Sagittarius and Scorpius, as seen from the River Ridge Observatory Saturday night. In the center is the Pipe Nebula (or Barnard 67 after the astronomer who pioneered the study of these dark nebulae). It’s a tobacco pipe, or maybe something besides tobacco, and you can see the bowl and stem of it. You can see the dark nebulae tracing their way all over this. These are cold gas and dust that aren’t glowing but instead blocking the light from the stars behind them.Glowing red in the upper left is the Lagoon Nebula, one of the best star forming regions in our neck of the woods.This was made from 40 60 second images with a Canon 800D and 50mm lens at f/2. Cropped a little and processed in Photoshop.
