M81 and M82 (Michael Jaramillo)

M81 and M82

M81 and M82 have always been two of my favorite objects to observe visually. They were the first galaxies I ever saw through my first telescope in like 2010 and in 2014, I got to see SN 2014J through a 14” dob. While looking up the location of potential background galaxies online, I discovered the lovely faint dwarf galaxy Holmberg IX and found out a lot about it.

Holmberg IX is a dwarf satellite of M81 and quite the interesting object. It’s a very low surface brightness galaxy with an apparent magnitude of 16.5. For comparison, M81 is 6.94. Holmberg IX is also thought to be the youngest nearby galaxy with an estimated age of 200 million years, likely forming from gravitational interactions in the M81 Group. These same interactions are responsible for the starburst activity in M82. Inside Holmberg IX is one of two known yellow supergiant eclipsing binaries, a rare binary system in which the two stars of roughly equal mass are orbiting each other close enough to share material between them. Often, rotating binaries of unequal mass spiral inwards and form a common envelope, a cloud of gas stripped from and surrounding the two stars and it resembles an ellipse. However, yellow supergiant eclipsing binaries resemble a peanut because the mass of the system is equally split. This causes a periodic brightening and dimming as the object rotates, making it appear as one star and then as two.

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Description: Holmberg IX finally showing up!

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Description: DSS: Restacked using Entropy Weighted Average (HDR) instead of Kappa Sigma Clipping
PixInsight: DBE -> Histogram Transform -> Dynamic PSF -> Star Mask -> Deconvolution -> ABE (Division) -> ABE (Subtraction) -> Range Selection (to work with background) Mask -> Curves Transform -> ACDNR (background) -> Invert Range Selection Mask -> ACDNR (stars and galaxies) -> Dark Structure Enhance -> ACDNR (everything)

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Description: It's been super cloudy for a few months now, so I've decided to see if I can reprocess any of my images better. M81 and M82 are my favorite objects, so I started with that data set. I think I was able to coax a tiny bit of IFN out of the background, but I'm not sure.

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Status	Basic success
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Astrometry.net job	2567299
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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