Lucius Crick, Lantern in the abyss (July theme: Winter)

As Winter is the Milky Way season, I decided to target the 'Lagoon' and 'Trifid' nebulas, located in the core of the Milky Way. This image took 2 nights of exposure, after months of waiting for the clouds to part. It consists of 296x 30 second exposures, resulting in just under 2 and a half hours of total exposure time. This was especially hard to capture as i live in the light polluted suburbia of Newcastle. The resulting image took many hours of capturing, stacking and processing. I love space, and want to share its beauty with others through astrophotogrgaphy.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.