Center of the Lagoon Nebula

This close-up shot of the center of the Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8) clearly shows the delicate structures formed when the powerful radiation of young stars interacts with the hydrogen cloud they formed from. This image was created from exposures taken with the Wide Field Channel of the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the Hubble Space Telescope. Light from glowing hydrogen is colored red. Light from ionized nitrogen is colored green, and light through a yellow filter is colored blue. The blue-white flare at the upper-left of the image is scattered light from a bright star just outside the field of view. The field of view is about 3.3 by 1.7 arcminutes.