Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Ursa Major (UMa)  ·  Contains:  Bode's Galaxy  ·  Cigar Galaxy  ·  M 81  ·  M 82  ·  NGC 3031  ·  NGC 3034
M81 and M82, Chris Sullivan
M81 and M82
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M81 and M82

M81 and M82, Chris Sullivan
M81 and M82
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M81 and M82

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Description

Processing this one was absolutely brutal. I’ve been sitting on these data for over a month because my first two attempts looked absolutely terrible. I just couldn’t get the colors to work at all. I finally gave it another shot last Friday and I’ve been working on it ever since. For the purists: You should know I masked and pasted the crap out of this because once I finally got the stars, background and M82 to look nice, M81 looked downright ugly. So I tried just processing M81 and once I got it looking how I wanted, M82 had been completely destroyed. I definitely feel like this is my most ‘overprocessed’ image, and I still managed to blow out the core of M81. Special thanks to Jeremy Scheere, Cameron Jack, Samara Nagle, Brian Fulda, Jarrett Trezzo and Elie Kheirallah for input on this one!

FYI: Despite the integration time, there was no trace of IFN even in my superlum stack. Bortle 7-8 skies are apparently just too bright to capture it.

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