Blooming Trifid

Like a cosmic flower blooming amongst the stars, the colorful and famous Trifid nebula is captured in this image taken through a backyard telescope in Huntsville, Alabama, on September 19.

A star-forming region in the plane of our Milky Way galaxy that sculpted itself into pillars and jets of gas and dust, the Trifid cloud spans some 40 light-years across and sits about 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius.