Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Ursa Major (UMa)  ·  Contains:  Bode's Galaxy  ·  HD85458  ·  M 81  ·  NGC 3031
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M81 Close Up, Justin Worden
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M81 Close Up

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
M81 Close Up, Justin Worden
Powered byPixInsight

M81 Close Up

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

The face-on spiral galaxy we all know and love, M81, from the backyard with an 8" GSO Ritchey Chretien telescope.

From Wiki:
Messier 81 (also known as NGC 3031 or Bode's Galaxy) is a grand design spiral galaxy about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. It has a D25 isophotal diameter of 29.44 kiloparsecs (96,000 light-years).[2][5] Because of its relative proximity to the Milky Way galaxy, large size, and active galactic nucleus (which harbors a 70 million M☉[6] supermassive black hole), Messier 81 has been studied extensively by professional astronomers. The galaxy's large size and relatively high brightness also makes it a popular target for amateur astronomers.[7] In late February 2022, astronomers reported that M81 may be the source of FRB 20200120E, a repeating fast radio burst.[8][9]

Processing in Pixinsight
1.Dynamic Crop on all channels 
2.Dynamic Background Extraction on all channels (division then subtraction).
3.Pixelmath to isolate Ha in Ha channel.
4.Pixelmath to add Ha to red channel
5.LRGB combination to combine RGB channels.
6.Background Neutralization and Color Calibration applied.
7.EZ Denoise applied to luminance channel.
8.EZ Soft stretch applied to RGB image
9.Luminance channel extracted from RGB image and applied to add saturation
10.SCNR 
11.Range Mask applied to RGB image and curves transformation applied for saturation/brightness
12.Convolution applied to RGB image
13.Manually stretched luminance channel using Histogram Transformation
14.Luminance channel applied to RGB image
15.Starnet ++ used to create starmask.
16.Morphological Transformation applied to starmask
17.Starmask applied to LRGB image
18.Morphological Transformation applied to LRGB image for star reduction
19.LocalizedHistogramEqualization Applied with background mask applied.
20.CurvesTransformation applied to add saturation
21.TGVDenoise applied to background
22.HDRMultiscaleTransform applied
23.UnsharpMask applied to core for sharpening

Comments

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

M81 Close Up, Justin Worden

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