M82

[Peter]

Hi again,

After all of the kind remarks regarding my last post of M13 I thought I'd show you all another of my images this time M82 in Ursa Major.

The picture was taken on the 7th April 2007 at around 10pm using my Canon DSLR. The exposure was just 50 seconds and the camera was set to 800ASA. It was taken at the focal plane of my 12.75" f6 reflector.

Please feel free to have a tweak or two.

Enjoy Peter

[Trevor]

Quick tweak in iris.

[dazza1639]

Nice one Pete, It looks like you where suffering from a bit of the Orange sky of death there, but you definately caught it. The un-mistakable cigar shape of M82. It looks like you caught plenty of data so I'm sure some of our processing experts will be able to get an even better image from that.

Darren

[Peter]

Yes you're right about the light pollution, there was a street lamp not to far away from it when I took it. It should be better now its higher. Thats way its only a short exposure, when I tried longer exposures the picture was nearly all washed out with the red glow.

[MartinB]

All well focussed and starting to show up nicely. don't be put off by the light pollution, it is pretty easy to process out. The trouble with this image is that 50 seconds just isn't long enough. You can get away with short subs on bright globs but M82 is that bit dimmer. You don't have to go for longer exposures, just get more 50 second exposures then you can stack them together. I've had a go with your image but I've had to clip the background a lot to smooth it out.

[barkis]

Good capture Peter, and good advice following it up. You have to say the wizards on SGL can certainly bring out the best of what's there.

Well done All.

Ron.