Lagoon Nebula

What is Lagoon Nebula?

Nebulae· Distance 4,100 ly. One of the few nebulae visible to the naked eye, hanging like a faint cloud above the spout of the Sagittarius teapot, split by a dark dust lane that looks like a lagoon. Point the Sky view toward the galactic center to find it.

Where Lagoon Nebula is in your sky right now: https://nowsky.org/solar/sky?sel=lagoon nebula — location and time set automatically, no login.

Its place in the sky

A nebula, in the direction of Sagittarius, spanning about 90 arcminutes of sky — 2.9 times the width of the full Moon.

Distance and scale

Figures are representative approximations. Source: compiled from NASA and IAU public data.

Discovery and name

Noted by Hodierna in 1654; named for the lagoon-like dark channel across its middle.

Frequently asked

How far is Lagoon Nebula from Earth?

~4,100 ly.

What kind of object is Lagoon Nebula?

emission nebula + open cluster.

Where in the sky is Lagoon Nebula?

In the direction of Sagittarius.

Where is Lagoon Nebula in the sky right now?

Open the sky view for your location and time and it shows the position in the sky right now.

First recorded in Sicily, 1654

The Lagoon was recorded a century before Messier (1764). In 1654 the Sicilian priest and astronomer Giovanni Hodierna compiled a catalogue of some forty nebulae and clusters with a Galilean telescope, and the Lagoon was among them. His catalogue never spread beyond Sicily and was rediscovered only in the 1980s; in the meantime credit for discovery had gone to Le Gentil in France in 1747.

Hodierna divided nebulae into those his telescope resolved into stars, those it partly resolved, and those it did not resolve at all — the first classification separating clusters from true nebulae. The Lagoon fell into the mixed class of star group plus glowing cloud, which matches what we know it to be today: an emission nebula with the open cluster NGC 6530. Even a small seventeenth-century telescope half understood what it was looking at.

The nebula in depth

The Lagoon Nebula (M8) is a giant star-forming region about 4,100 light-years away toward the center of our galaxy in Sagittarius. It covers three full-Moon widths of sky, and under dark skies it shows to the naked eye as a hazy patch in the Milky Way. The name comes from the dark dust lane cutting through the middle like a lagoon.

Inside lie the young open cluster NGC 6530 and the star Herschel 36, whose fierce wind sculpts the surrounding gas. Near it, the Hourglass Nebula imaged by Hubble is a violent nursery where knots of gas a few solar systems wide swirl and collapse. The dark specks scattered across the nebula are Bok globules, each condensing into new stars.

In the Sky view, find the Sagittarius teapot low in the south on summer evenings and look just above the star at the spout. From Korea it stays low, so a clear southern horizon helps. Binoculars show cluster and nebula together, and the Trifid Nebula (M20) sits right above it, so both fit in one field.

Related

Figures are representative approximations. Simulated positions use J2000 mean elements.