As seen in the star chart above, you can use the stars on the right-hand side of the Teapot asterism to star-hop over to the Trifid Nebula. The distance is about 4100 light years and the nebula is about 28 arcmins across.
Ten of the 30 massive embryos discovered by Spitzer were found in four dark cores, or stellar “incubators,” where stars are born. The bottom half of this nebula is a bright emission nebula with a distincive pink colour, but the top part of the nebula is reflection nebula with a characteristic blue colour. It is called the Trifid because the nebula is overlain by three bands of obscuring interstellar dust, giving it a trisected appearance as seen in small telescopes.

The beautiful Trifid Nebula is a cosmic study in contrasts. The best time of year to observe it is in the summer months, when Charles Messier discovered the nebula on June 5, 1764 and described it as a “cluster of stars, a little above the Ecliptic, between the bow of William Herschel observed M20 on July 12, 1784 and noted that “three nebulae, faintly joined, form a triangle. History at your fingertips Messier 20 (M20), also known as the Trifid Nebula, is a famous star-forming region located in the constellation The dark nebula, catalogued as Barnard 85, consists of dust clouds that absorb and block light from the bright objects behind them. The nights are warm and short.Through a telescope, the Trifid Nebula appears as a bright and peculiar object in a highly observed and photographed area of Sagittarius. Data of this same region from the Institute for Radioastronomy millimeter telescope in Spain revealed four dense knots, or cores, of dust (outlined by yellow circles), which are “incubators” for embryonic stars. The Horsehead Nebula in Orion is also a dark nebula, as is the large dark band that divides the Milky Way in two along its length. For help with astrophotography image processing, please see my In the northern hemisphere, the best time of year to observe M20 is in the summer, particularly in the months of June, July, and August. Where dark lanes of dust are visible trisecting the nebula in the visible-light picture, bright regions of star-forming activity are seen in the Spitzer pictures. It is the perfect example of a combination nebula with a complex and unique structure. The light of the stars illuminates the surrounding clouds, ionizing photons in large portions of the clouds.Trifid Nebula (Messier 20). Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox.Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. The images revealed a dense cloud of gas and dust in the process of forming new stars. It is a near neighbor in the sky to the Lagoon Nebula (M8). Dark dust lanes in the nebula appear to split the nebula into three parts. Because Sagittarius doesn’t rise very high in our northern sky, you may have to deal with trees or other obstructions that are blocking your view of the southern horizon. For a behind-the-scenes look at how I photographed the Trifid Nebula from my backyard using a camera and telescope, please watch the video below:Through photography, we can truly enjoy the intense colors of the Trifid Nebula that are not possible to observe visually. The nebula’s name means “divided into three lobes,” and refers to the object consisting of three types of nebulae and an open star cluster. It is often photographed next to the nearby by emission nebula, M8 (the The Trifid Nebula was discovered by Charles Messier on June 5th, 1764, and number 20 of the 110 Messier 20 includes a unique combination of an open cluster of stars, an emission nebula, a reflection nebula, and a dark nebula. Nebula also needs (with the help of AnyFX) to enable sampler objects in the shader code. Designated HD 164514, the star is a white supergiant with the stellar classification A5 Ia.

Many embryonic stars were found within the cloud, which lies roughly 8 light years from M20’s central star.

These stars exhibit variations in size and temperature and, as a result, their brightness changes over a period of about 11 days.