M82 Cigar Galaxy - Creator of Stars (Linwood Ferguson)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Ursa Major (UMa) · Contains: Cigar Galaxy · M 82 · NGC 3034

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M82 Cigar Galaxy - Creator of Stars

Revision title: M82 Cigar Galaxy (Culled and reprocessed)

Link: https://www.captivephotons.com/Photography/Astrophotography/i-bC7D8F6

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M82 Cigar Galaxy - Creator of Stars

Revision title: M82 Cigar Galaxy (Culled and reprocessed)

Link: https://www.captivephotons.com/Photography/Astrophotography/i-bC7D8F6

M81 is also known as the Cigar Galaxy, and is a fast breeder of new stars, thought to be exacerbated by gravitational interaction with M81 (also known as Bode's galaxy). The galaxy is just above (or below depending on your orientation) the back of Ursa Major (Big Bear, of which the Big Dipper is part). It is about 12 million light years from Earth.

This M82 image is a combination of LRGB and some Ha. The Ha was blended in both Red and Green channels and provided a lot of the plume's structure in orange, though after the fact I shifted it back a bit into red (I do not personally like the overly saturated red that is often used for Ha, I like to reserve it for really red things, like carbon stars). The image was produced with a C11 Edge HD at 2800mm on an AP1100 mount from my back yard in Florida.

This was imaged over nine nights in February and early March 2022.

I welcome criticism or suggestions for improvement.

This version includes:

180 of 300s Ha
140 of 240s Blue
119 of 240s Green
124 of 240s Red

That's a total of 40.5 hours, or about 1/3rd culled from the original version.

Original
Final
B

B

Title: M82 Cigar Galaxy (Culled and reprocessed)

Description: This is a reprocess of the prior version. I very heavily culled the data to retain only data with good FWHM (below 2.1") and eccentricity, to see if I could draw out more detail at the likely cost of more noise.

In doing so, I tried it both with and without the Luminance data I took (without meaning I formed a synthetic luminance from the mean of other channels). I found it added no significant detail to use the Luminance, indeed it made the stars more bloated and seemed to slightly dull the galaxy detail. So I discarded the Luminance as well.

I welcome criticism and suggestions.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7450791
PixInsight job	QZGGVMI68E47H6IR5NBKJAVBQKQLS4CJ
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	09h55m50s.375
RA (top/left)	09h53m34s.650
RA (top/right)	09h58m06s.922
RA (bottom/right)	09h58m08s.402
RA (bottom/left)	09h53m31s.758

Dec (center)	+69°41′11″.15
Dec (top/left)	+69°33′25″.21
Dec (top/right)	+69°33′26″.58
Dec (bottom/right)	+69°48′50″.50
Dec (bottom/left)	+69°48′51″.48

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M82 Cigar Galaxy - Creator of Stars

Revision title: M82 Cigar Galaxy (Culled and reprocessed)

M82 Cigar Galaxy - Creator of Stars

Revision title: M82 Cigar Galaxy (Culled and reprocessed)

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M82 Cigar Galaxy - Creator of Stars

Revision title: M82 Cigar Galaxy (Culled and reprocessed)

M82 Cigar Galaxy - Creator of Stars

Revision title: M82 Cigar Galaxy (Culled and reprocessed)

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