M82 is known as the Cigar Galaxy, a name which can be forgiven, as visually the red Ha "explosion" is invisible to the eye. Photographically, I cannot think of a better name than the "Exploding Cigar", as it does appear to be some sort of insane cosmic joke that went way wrong. M82 is a starburst galaxy with an incredible rate of star formation (about 10X the rate in the core as in our own Milky Way core). This is the result of an interaction with its partner, M81. Since M81 is so much more massive, it is M82 that bears the brunt of the encounter, while M81 goes on with with little apparent perturbation. Aside from the impressive emission in Ha, those exploding gases produce strong emission in X-ray, IR and radio frequencies (not shown here). A good general overview of the physics behind it can be found
hereThe images were all taken through an L-eNhance filter with my color ZWO ASI2600MC Pro camera, were calibrated, registered and stacked in DeepSkyStacker, processed in Startools, then final adjustments were done with layers in Photoshop. A shout out with a big thanks to
@Jacob Heppell for sharing his Photoshop processing tutorials with me, they were very helpful in the final processing of this image.
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