Messier 18 - The Open Cluster in Sagittarius

Messier 18 is an open star cluster located around 4,900 light-years from our Earth. I have read on some pages and books that it is around 1,800 light-years away, but that is data that predates the Gaia observations. Gaia parallax data says 4,900 light-years. It resides in the constellation Sagittarius. the cluster contains about 40 young stars and does not have a dense core like some of the other star clusters in the Messier catalog. I was lucky enought to capture this in the same FOV with Messier 24, the Sagittarius star cloud.

I captured this during a Messier Marathon I did in August 2025.