Trifid: Three in One.

Visible in binoculars as a tiny region of fuzziness at the top of the spout of the "tea pot" (the Sagittarius constellation), the Trifid nebula has been described as the site of "unspeakable beauty and unimaginable bedlam" simultaneously showing colors and chaos of star birth and evolution. The light we see today from this region 50 light years across, is about 3000 years old.

As I set out to image this for the first time ever, I felt a bit like fish out of water all over again. Knowing visual observation would be underwhelming, and wanting to do several targets in one night - I started with imaging right away. The scope alignment, go-to accuracy and focus test using Jupiter checked out fine. But once I slewed to Trifid and took the first shot, I couldn't trust if I really had it in the frame. There was something there obviously, but I didn't know what it was. The little fuzziness in the star field didn't look anything like the images on the internet. It was too small, and for all I knew, I could be shooting a random nondescript object in the region. To make matters worse, the minute long exposures were beginning to show star trails which I knew would be kicked out by the stacking software.  It was also the first half of July, too early for an August target after all. Despite all these ifs and buts, I decided to make some compromising tweaks to the setup and power through the imaging.

Fortunately, Trifid did not disappoint. In the image above, I got some natural colors - a dash of red here and bit of blue there, and of course the ominous dark "Y" that is the hallmark of Trifid. 

Mission accomplished. 

The Trifid nebula while treated as a single object by Charles Messier, is actually three nebulae in one. The red lower lobe is an emission nebula, the blue upper one is a reflection nebula and  the dark "gaps" are a dark/absorption nebula This video explains the concept:

Nested within the Trifid is a stellar nursery that was the object of a 1997 Hubble investigation. The image below from HST known as "Trifid Pillars and Jets" shows a region inside the nebula.

Credit: J. Hester (Arizona St. U) et al., WFPC2, HST, NASA

Visible in the above false color image is a huge gas and dust pillar within the Trifid, with two smaller pillars pointing up and left, which to me looks like two antennae on the head of a cosmic caterpillar. The pink dots are newly formed low-mass stars. A star near the small pillar's end is slowly being stripped of its accreting gas by radiation from a star off the frame.

Some call the dust pillars the equivalent of interstellar mountains that are being slowly eroded away by the "weather" of nearby stellar radiation. 

If there are mountain peaks and hostile weather in space, can the interstellar explorers be far behind?