Mosaic of NGC 6604, M16, M17, M18 and IC4701

We live in a spiral galaxy called 'the Milky Way Galaxy'. It's characterised by several well-defined spiral arms, each containing billions of stars and thousands of gas clouds. When we look into the galactic centre, the view is obscured by the arms sitting between us and the centre bulge. This image shows a small portion of 'the Sagittarius Arm' in the night sky.

The most striking feature is perhaps the beautiful nebulosity. Those are interstellar dust and clouds, mostly made of hydrogen, ionised by nearby stars. Occasionally, these clouds contract due to gravity. When enough hydrogen particles are squeezed together with enough forces, nuclear fusion begins and new stars are born. Our solar system was born this way billions of years ago.

The blue regions in the centre are M16 and M17, also known as the Eagle Nebula and the Omega Nebula. Those are powerful star nurseries where thousands of new stars are being born. The radiation from the newborn stars ionised the nearby clouds, causing them to glow.

The dark patches in the background are thick and dense molecular clouds. They appear to be black because visible light can't penetrate through them. Interestingly, a large proportion of those molecular clouds are made of organic molecules, signalling that the raw material of life is truly abundant throughout the universe. Maybe given the right environment and enough time, some of those molecules are bound to assemble into a self-replicating sequence, of what we call life.

There are many other well-studied objects in this mosaic. From left to right are NGC 6604, M16, M17, M18 and IC4701.

(The data was acquired from Telescopelive, which I processed using pixinsight and photoshop.)