Tag: Cigar Galaxy

Geez – I’ll Take This! – M81 and M82 Processed With DeepSkyStacker

M81 and M82 Stacked and Processed with DSS

Wow – I’m pleased with this. That’s 10 images taken with the Takumar 200mm lens at f/5.6 on the Canon t3i 60 seconds ISO 800 with three darks and one bias. They were stacked in DSS and postprocessed there as well following this tutorial. It’s cropped to about 1/4 of the original. The focus wasn’t perfect, there’s still some Chromatic Aberration, and I’ve probably over-processed it but it’s fine.

Above and to the left of M81 you can see a corner of three stars and, just beyond, a fuzzy patch that is probably NGC3077. M81, M82, and NGC3077 are all about 12 million light years away.

This Bode’s Well – In Which I Am Even More Galactic

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.

19-11-21 Bodes-Cigar 4311

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.
IMG_4311