Restore the Lagoon

What you see depends on your point of view.

From his observatory in the Hôtel de Cluny in downtown Paris, May 23, 1764, Charles Messier must have had some excellent points of view. The southern-most object in his catalog of deep sky objects, M7, known as Ptolemy's Cluster, never rose more than about 6° above the horizon. Consider that a row of trees 10 ½ feet tall, standing 100 feet away, would forever block your view of M7.

Charlottesville hangs out at a latitude 10° further south than Paris, which should give us an advantage on Messier's southern objects. But my Hôtel de Cluny is in the middle of the woods, and my southern treeline 100 feet away is 85 feet tall or more. That's an opaque curtain rising somewhere around 40° above the horizon. Twenty-nine of Messier's 109 objects have maximum altitudes that never exceed 40° and thus can do no more than illuminate the back side of the forest, their photons never reaching my telescope.

"We need a vacation!"

"I'm with you, Max. Where should we go?"

"How about the Lagoon Nebula? It's beautiful there this time of year."

"Um, that's a problem. Didn't you read what I just wrote up there? The Lagoon Nebula, M8, only ever gets 27° above the horizon here. Unless you want to chop down a whole forest this month, it isn't happening."

"Tsk, you have such a limited imagination, Smitty! Obviously, we just need to go someplace, some other place, from which we can then go to the Lagoon."

And so we did.

The beach house was north of the resort town center, several blocks off Ocean Drive. It was in a well landscaped suburban setting with lots of trees. Southern pines, crape myrtles, giant magnolias. At first blush this wasn't going to get us to the Lagoon Nebula.

But the beach house had a secret. It came with a Widow's Walk on its rooftop! Climb up a spiral staircase and you could step out onto a railed platform high up in the tree tops, perfect for traveling to M8. And so Max and I set about carrying the pieces of our little telescope spaceship up to the roof and setting up for a night's adventure.

A note in passing: despite what you may read from internet chatbots about life on a Widow's Walk, mosquitoes – at least those mosquitoes that call Rehoboth Beach home – can decidedly fly to the rooftop and stick you, every bit as easily as if you were down in the marsh. Just saying.

M8 is an emission nebula located in the constellation Sagittarius, the Archer, the constellation low in the southern horizon that is often outlined as a teapot. The Lagoon Nebula is found just above the teapot, between the lid and spout. It is a massive molecular cloud of hydrogen undergoing extensive star-forming activity.

In the banner image up top you can see the bright center region surround by turbulent red clouds. The color is due to intense ultraviolet light from young stars ionizing the hydrogen molecules which then emit that energy as light in red wavelengths.

The darker region circling around the center, which looks to me like a large backward question mark, is what gives the "Lagoon" its name. For scale, the nebula is roughly 110 light years across; three full moons will fit inside its boundaries.

The small dark blotches scattered across the face of the M8 are known as "Bok globules," a characterization first formalized by Bart Bok and Edith Reilly in 1947. These are now recognized as dense condensations of dust and gas, collapsing protostellar material, typically containing the equivalent of 10 times the mass of the Sun, which support the formation of binary stars and star clusters.

To the left of the central "Lagoon" region, approximately on the horizontal mid-line, you can see a concentrated density of young stars, an "open cluster" distinct enough to have its own catalog designation as NGC 6530. In our banner image, I can count somewhere on the the order of two dozen distinct stars as obvious members of the cluster. Deeper imaging in that region turns up a bazillion candidate stars and over 2,700 likely confirmed members of the cluster.

At first it wasn't clear what was going on, but as we got closer to M8 we could see a circling mass of space ships busily working around the outskirts. The ships themselves were large utilitarian designs, painted in drab industrial brown, and adorned with a logo that proclaimed "Stardent Custodial Extreme Disposal." Each exuded multiple articulated tubes, terminating in flared openings seemingly a quarter of a light year across. Each spaceship a nightmare mechanical octopus.

In weird pantomime, they were all engaged in vacuuming up M8's irradiant red molecular cloud and compressing it into on-board container tanks. Then, when the tanks were full, they were blasted off towards a nearby cauldron of collapsing dust, disappearing into the accretion disk swirling around a formative protostar. Extinguished. Out of sight, out of mind.

When we finally got to the Lagoon, we were surprised to find it had been engineered with some sort of artificial liner, an avocado-colored plastic foam-like basin covering. The walkway around the Lagoon was studded with military statues staring at handheld gadgets. They resembled the result you would accomplish by mixing a helicopter paratrooper with a park ranger. On second look, however, these weren't statues after all but, rather, actual real live helicopter park para-rangers. They were apparently just bored half to death.

"Hey, Man," Max addressed one of the statue guards, "What's with all the giant spaceship vacuum cleaners?"

The addressed statue didn't respond, but his buddy replied, "They're getting rid of the red."

"Yeah," said another. "Our God Emperor hates the color. Says it's all the fault of the previous God Emperor and has ordered the lagoon restored."

"Wow, that's pretty expensive, isn't it? The Lagoon Nebula is huge!" I blurted out.

"Longer than the Empire State Building is tall!" replied the first Park Para-Ranger. "But it's not expensive. The work is on no-bid contracts so it doesn't cost anything."

That kept me busy for the rest of the afternoon trying to parse an overload of anachronisms and anti-logic.

"Actually," whispered the previously mum Park Para-Ranger, "We think he's after the Hourglass."

"The Hourglass?"

"The Hourglass. It's there in the Lagoon. Legend has it that he who holds the Hourglass controls time. And he who controls time becomes immortal."

"Hmm, I don't know," replied Max. "Immortality is a tricky business. When the sands run out, the Hourglass gets turned completely upside down, starting all over again from the beginning."

You will find the "Hourglass" mentioned in virtually every description of M8 and it was reportedly first spotted by John Herschel back when John Herschel roamed astronomy. There is a modern pseudo-colored closeup of the Hourglass taken with the Hubble Space Telescope and it is very pretty, but it is a little like looking at the TV picture of a soccer celebrity attending the World Cup and trying to guess where they are sitting in the stadium.

I confess, I couldn't spot an "Hourglass" object in the published Lagoon Nebula photographs and I couldn't place the Hubble closeup in the context of the larger M8 structure. Nor could I find an Hourglass in the banner image up top that Max and I captured from the Widow's Walk.

So I backed off the image processing a bit and looked again. And then I found it. There all the time. The Hourglass is so bright that when the image intensity is stretched to show the larger M8 structure, the Hourglass gets washed out and lost in the surrounding brightness. Here is an enlargement of the central part of M8 with the brightness turned down to bring out the Hourglass. You can almost hear the sands sifting through the gap.

"Wow, it is really hot here!" said Max.

"No kidding," said the guard. "One guy passed out the other day and had to be packed in ice for safe keeping."

"You know, the God Emperor is just making it worse by blasting all that molecular cloud from the Nebula into the protostar accretion disk? It just makes it hotter and one day it's going to ignite a nuclear reaction."

"God Emperor says that is all a Wagmon hoax," said the guard. "Anyway, all the so-called "climate experts" have been claiming that forever. But it still just keeps getting hotter."

"Well, that's because! ..." I sputtered, but Max cut me off, shooting me a "side eye" look that would have stopped a charging water buffalo in its tracks.

"What the heck is this Lagoon liner made of?" asked Max. He leaned over the Lagoon and stuck his hand in to feel the texture and get a sense of the composite.

"What did you go and do that for!?" shouted the Park Para-Ranger. "Now you're under arrest!"

"What?"

"You're under arrest! We arrest anyone who touches the Lagoon. Orders of the God Emperor!"

"He needs scapegoats for the crappy engineering," muttered one of the Para-Rangers.

"Enough, Oggie! You'll get us all indicted. You want to eat bargkinder for the rest of your miserable life?"

Oggie went back to staring at his handheld device.

"So are you guy's Intergalactic Celestial Enforcement troops?" Max asked.

"ICE? Those suckers? Hell no! We're members of the Nebula Guard."

"So what are you doing here? You're trained for natural disaster management and civil emergencies."

"Picking up trash," muttered Oggie. No one contradicted him this time.

"Ah, I'm sorry. That's a little demeaning, eh?" replied Max. "You know, this weird avocado green liner for the Lagoon? Well, back where I come from we have a name for it. It's called "American Flag Blue."

This didn't compute for the Park Para-Rangers, now the Nebula Guard crew. They just stood there looking completely puzzled.

"Here," said Max. "Check it out." And he handed them one of his Pegasus AI LLM RoboBot devices. Soon, a couple of chuckles percolated out from the Guard crew clustered around the display. Then a full-blown guffaw. And in short order the entire entourage was howling.

"Ha! God Emperor doofusborg!" shouted one.

"Flag blue algae! Straight of warm ooze! Bwha!!" convulsed another.

I looked at Max. Max looked at me.

"The sounds of galactic mockery," he grinned, and we walked quietly back to our little telescope of a spaceship.

The Nebula Guard were still laughing and tossing high-fives the next morning as the sun came up over our rooftop headquarters on the Widow's Walk.