M81 - Bode's Galaxy

Pixieland Star Party was windy this year. Really windy. Non-stop windy. It was also mostly overcast, so there was not much opportunity to do any serious imaging. This isn't really the best time of year for M81, but I wanted to get it sometime.

The idea for this image came from last year's Table Mountain. My main target for that was a bi-color Crescent Nebula, which I posted here last year. I had some spare time after completing my plan for the Crescent. On a whim, I just pointed at M81 and started capturing. I managed to get all of 12 minutes worth of luminance data before it set below the wall of my observatory tent.

When I was showing the Crescent to my wife (an image that I really like), I also showed here an unprocessed image of the 12 minutes of M81...and she liked it better than my main image. Hmmm.

Anyway, I set out to Pixieland intended to get multiple nights worth of M81 data to make a real image of it for her. It didn't work out that way. I ended up with just about 4 hours of total time, which is everything I could get. And the data is not great. There were 20 mph or so winds and transparency was poor. The luminance data is not too bad, given the constraints, but the color data is tragicly bad. I had to hammer it with noise reduction, and the fixed pattern noise was too strong to eliminate without clobbering the faint areas in the color frames. The really heavy hand on the color data definitely gives this image an over-processed and over-smoothed look.

I'm posting it here because I want to show *something*, and if I only posted images that I was really happy with, there wouldn't be much in my gallery.

The capture details are 130x30 seconds luminance, 120x30, 110x30 and 109x30 seconds red, green and blue, respectively. The equipment details are listed in the technical card.

This is about my fourth attempt at M81 and it is actually the best of them. I will definitely be revisiting it someday.

Oh, and this was my first attempt at imaging with Sequence Generator Pro. I've been using CCDAutopilot for many years. I've set up my AP1100 as a lighter weight portable setup (much lighter than my AP1600) and wanted a simpler software stack to run on my Surface tablet. It's also my first experience with PHD2. I am very impressed with what you get with SGP and PHD2. I will be using it more.