I took advantage of a clear and moonless night to shoot M24, which from my location is very low on the horizon. It is beautiful when observed with binoculars, and I have long intended to portray it in photography to appreciate all the details and the beautiful dark nebulae.

M24
The Small Sagittarius Star Cloud (also known as IC4715) is a star cloud in the constellation of Sagittarius approximately 600 light years wide, which was catalogued by Charles Messier in 1764. It should not be confused with the nearby Large Sagittarius Star Cloud which lies about 10° to the south, just west to the Sagittarius "Teapot" and very close to the Milky Way center direction.
M24 is part of the Scutum-Centaurus Arm of our galaxy as indicated in figure 1.
It fills a space of significant volume to a depth between 10000 to 16000 light-years. The star cloud is the most dense concentration of individual stars visible using binoculars, with around 1,000 stars visible within a single field of view.
The star cloud incorporates two prominent dark nebulae which are vast clouds of dense, obscuring interstellar dust. This dust blocks light from the more distant stars, which keeps them from being seen from Earth. Lying on the northwestern side is Barnard 92, which is the darker of the two. Within the star field, the nebula appears as an immense round hole devoid of stars. American astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard discovered this dark nebula in 1913. Along the northeast side lies Barnard 93, as large as Barnard 92 though less obvious. There are also other dark nebulae within M24, including Barnard 304 and Barnard 307.
M24 holds some similarities with NGC206, a bright, large star cloud within the Andromeda Galaxy.

NGC 6603
It is an open cluster discovered by John Herschel in 1830. Situated within M24, it consists of about 30 stars in a field of about 5 arc minutes in diameter, and is about 9400 light years remote, therefore it is part of the M24 structure. Its linear diameter is about 14 light years. Many sources improperly identify NGC 6603 as M24.

NGC 6567
NGC6567 (other designation PK 11-0.2, ESO 590-PN8) is a planetary nebula, distant 11700 light years. The object was discovered by Edward Charles Pickering in 1882.

(text excerpted by Wikipedia)


Figure 1: The red dot marks the location of M24 in the galactic plane.
The original Milky Way image was published in 2008 by NASA/JPL-Caltech (author R. Hurt).