Above Dubhe (the lip of the big dipper) there are two relatively bright galaxies Bode’s Galaxy M81 and the Cigar Galaxy M82. I was hoping I could catch them because they are the same sort of size and brightness as M110 which showed up near the Andromeda Galaxy with the same lens.
This is a single 60 second exposure with the 50mm Canon lens at f/4 and ISO 400. It has been cropped very significantly and poked at with the windows photo tool. In the field I thought this was too blown out so i took 10 30 second exposures and tried stacking them with deep sky stacker but i just wasn’t getting enough light.
The image below is the unmolested original. Obviously I need a longer lens. This is all good fun though. I was pleased that I was able to locate the galaxies by keying off Dubhe and learning to recognize little asterisms like the triplet near the middle of the original below.
Astrophotography Newbie 
One thought on “This Bode’s Well – In Which I Am Even More Galactic”