This wide-field image shows two of the more prominent nebulae in the Milky Way galaxy.

The large red nebula at the bottom is the Lagoon Nebula (also known as M8 or NGC 6523), a star-forming region in the constellation Sagittarius. The Lagoon Nebula is one of only a few nebulae that are visible to the naked eye, and takes on a distinctly oval shape when viewed with modest-power binoculars, though the red color and detail you see here is only captured through long-exposure photography. The red glow of the nebula comes from hydrogen gas ionized by a nearby star and is a color characteristic of emission nebulae.

Above and to the right of the Lagoon Nebula is the Trifid Nebula (M20 / NGC 6514). Discovered in 1764, the Trifid Nebula is unique in that it is a combination of an emission nebula (the red portion at the bottom), a reflection nebula (the blue portion at the top that reflects the light from a nearby star) and a dark nebula (the dark areas of interstellar dust that seem to "cut" the nebula into several sections.

These two nebulae are located in the heart of the Milky Way galaxy and you can see many hundreds of thousands of stars in the background.

This image is a digital "stack" of 12 exposures, 8 minutes each for an equivalent exposure time of 96 minutes, and was captured at the Astronomical Society of Kansas City's Dark Sky Site near Butler, MO, on the night of August 6.