50 Hours of IFN goodness!!It's springtime and all of this dust certainly isn't helping my allergies! And there's a whole lot of it in this image of M81 and M82 (Bode's and Cigar Galaxies) in the form of the Integrated Flux Nebula. IFN is dust that lies outside of the galactic plane of the Milky Way but is illuminated from the starlight of the Milky Way itself. Since it lies so much further than intergalactic dust, it is WAY fainter and certainly demands dark skies and long integration times. Image acquisition is one thing, but the processing is a whole different beast and this definitely was a challenge. This is one of my longest projects in my entire astrophotography journey thus far and I'm happy with how it came out! Thanks to the super dark skies above my observatory, I was able to bring out some color in the IFN surrounding the galaxies and even a tiny hint of H-Alpha in it as well!
- 400 x 3m Lum
- 130 x 3m each R/G/B
- 135 x 5m H-Alpha
Nights: 3/13, 3/14, 3/23, 3/24, 3/25, 3/26, 3/27, 3/31, 4/1/22
All acquisition in NINA; All processing in PixInsight.
See my
Flickr for full processing details
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