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Back to LRGB imaging!! M81 - M82 and other neighbours...


James

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It's the end of galaxy season (at least here in the UK where astronomical darkness has come to an end for a few weeks) and after a long three year break from imaging galaxies  - due largely to imaging with a scope of focal length of just under 200mm - I've managed (just) to get some data in before it got too light...

I nearly didn't 'finish' this one as I've had some problems guiding objects over on the west side of the meridian (my 8 year old HEQ5 needs a little tweak I think!) and all of my subs showed some sign of my tracking problems but I've tweaked what I can.

M81 (aka Bodes nebula) and M82 (aka Cigar Galaxy) are two relatively close ( approx 12 million light years away) galaxies that are fascinating objects for several reasons - visually in a wide field both are bright and obvious and very different in appearance. For imagers this difference is good too and M82 has the added 'benefit' of jets of material being ejected from the galaxy which shows up in images as red bits streaming out from the galaxy. Back in 2014 there was also a supernova visible, an easy catch in images and visually - I remember seeing it in my 10" Newt easily, it was probably visible in much smaller scopes :) And finally this patch of sky contains some bright (ish) patches of the very faint integrated flux nebula.

I've deliberately not tried to show much of the IFN, it was a processing challenge too far for me (I'll go and practice) but some is just visible in the image below (or it was on my computer screen!). There was a fair amount of it visible during processing so I suspect a little more data and a little bit more processing skill and I'll be able to show it better.

Mount & Scope:  Esprit 100 on HEQ5 Pro
Camera: ZWO ASI 1600mm-Pro (Gain: 250, cooled to -30c)
Filter: Astronomik L-RGB Type 2c filters
Subframes: 103x  30 seconds Luminance, 30x  30 secs each of Red, Green & Blue and 23x  4 min Ha added into the Red channel (just over 3 hours total)
Control, capture, guiding through The SkyX Pro
Calibration, Stacking and processing in Pixinsight
 

Here's M81, M82, and NGC and a lot of PGC galaxies :) As usual, if you click on the image a sharper version loads up - and I've posted an annotated version with some labels - loads of galaxies in there!

M81-M82.thumb.jpg.3bfe9be51f276e3c2734e633842c75c8.jpg

 

M81-M82-annotated.thumb.jpg.03f1e00cd2e4fdf302e7f5329c79175c.jpg

 

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