M81 & M82 - Gotta love long winter nights! (Phil Hoppes)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Ursa Major (UMa) · Contains: Bode's Galaxy · Cigar Galaxy · HD85458 · HD85828 · M 81 · M 82 · NGC 3031 · NGC 3034

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M81 & M82 - Gotta love long winter nights!

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M81 & M82 - Gotta love long winter nights!

I've spent a few months now dialing in my new NYX-101 mount along with my old Vixen ED103S refractor. Now that I've had a chance to really make improvements in my NYX guiding I have also focused on some improvement on the Vixen OTA itself. I was having issues with the Moonlite focuser. Not it's problem, I was hanging too much weight on it. I contacted Ron at Moonlite and he suggested an upgrade body on my current focuser for a modest cost. I sent it in to him and he had it turned around and back to me in about 10 days. So nice to deal with someone who actually cares. The upgraded focuser works perfect and in the mean time I was able to do a semi-major overhaul in cleaning the optics and everything in the optical train.

I picked M33 and M81 as targets for the night. I fired up NINA and had a nice session started for 60x300" each on each target. M33 came out quite nice. Today I'm just posing M81. This came out quite nice with a good image on M82 to boot. It's nice when things work the way planned. My subs were so good that my post required very little adjustments other than some of the usual noise removal and some stretching in Photoshop.

Enjoy!

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	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
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Other
Unknown

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8909541
PixInsight job	HB1L0I82X4YSBG01BVDGNREOS1TBDZDJ
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	09h55m39s.46
RA (top/left)	09h49m08s.47
RA (top/right)	09h50m10s.22
RA (bottom/right)	10h01m43s.24
RA (bottom/left)	10h01m34s.42

Dec (center)	+69°03′21″.7
Dec (top/left)	+69°50′07″.2
Dec (top/right)	+68°13′38″.3
Dec (bottom/right)	+68°15′37″.4
Dec (bottom/left)	+69°52′22″.4

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M81 & M82 - Gotta love long winter nights!

M81 & M82 - Gotta love long winter nights!

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M81 & M82 - Gotta love long winter nights!

M81 & M82 - Gotta love long winter nights!

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