I imaged this huge galaxy 11 million light years away from our Milkyway galaxy, using my dedicated astronomy camera, my HEQ5Pro equatorial mount and my Skywatcher 200P telescope.
Total Integration time: 2 hours 40 mins
Moon coverage: 50%
Location: Northern Hemisphere
Bortle: 4
M81 or Bodes galaxy:
Messier 81 is a grand design spiral galaxy about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. M81 is to the righ of the plough as you can see in the iamge below taken from Stellarium on a Mac.
M81 is actually the very first galaxy I ever took an image of.
The image above was the second time I had tried to image this galaxy. I first imaged it in 2023, using my slightly older EQ5 Pro mount and my previous colour astronomy camera, the ZWO 294MC. The first time I imaged and procesed for the first time was such an amazing feeling. Seeing some of teh details appear around the sprial structire of this galaxy was so cathartic.
Even though my imaging and processing experience was very limited I will never forget the feeling of taking an image of a distant galaxy and processing it. My memory of processing Bodes galaxy for the first time will always stay with me for a very long time. Going from a black screen in Photoshop with some white specs for stars, to an image of a galaxy so far away, was mind blowing!
Processing this galaxy was actually a little easier to be fair than processing Triangulum galaxy. Bodes galaxy, being so far away meant there were actually less stars to resolve in the image which oddly made processing this a little easier.
I do intend to reshoot this galaxy using my monochrome camera setup using some of my LRGB filters.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed looking at my Bodes galaxy image
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