This image was a difficult challenge. Firstly, the main targets, M81 and M82 are bright galaxies that lie relatively close (in galactic terms) in the neighboring M81 group of galaxies, around 12 million light years distant from Earth and viewable in our Northern night sky in the constellation Ursa Major (The Big Dipper). M81 (the larger spiral) is a spiral galaxy with a diameter of about 90,000 light years. M82 is a very neat galaxy in that it is a Starburst galaxy, not just because of its appearance, but also because of the incredible rate at which it produces stars (10 times greater than the average galaxy). M82 produces stars so quickly because it is being gravitationally impacted by M81 which sends large amounts of gas toward the core of the galaxy, and ends up creating many large clusters of stars. M82 is much, much brighter than the Milky Way because of all of the gas, gravity and chaos.

I have imaged these galaxies before, but not only has my equipment totally changed since then but my abilities have grown quite a lot (hopefully that's pretty evident). This time, though, rather than just going for good crisp signal in the galaxies, I went really deep (10 minutes subs) to try to capture some Integrated Flux Nebula. The IFN is dust, basically a nebula, but different than regular milky way nebulae in the sense that the dust exists beyond the plane of our galaxy, and is illuminated by all of the stars of the Milky Way. The IFN is extremely faint and can only be seen away from the milky way disk, and even then only in dark skies with very long exposures. This image is a total of 22 hours of data, and it took me almost 3 months to complete due to horrendous weather. I'm very happy with how it turned out, and I'm extremely excited to have been able to capture some IFN in my first attempt at it. Hopefully sometime soon I'll be able to add some HA data as well, but for now this will have to do. All said and done I put something like 50 hours into this image, with image capture, calibration and processing, and I'm happy to be done and to move on to the next project. I hope you like it.

Please visit the full resolution version as there are tons of tiny galaxies in this image, and the main target galaxies, m81 and m82 both have some really cool features when viewed at 100%.

Technical Details:

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Imaging Scope: 115mm Meade 6000 Triplet Apo

Imaging Camera: ZWO ASI071MC Pro

Guiding Telescope: William Optics 50mm Guider

Guiding Camera: ZWO ASI 120MC Mini

Mount: Skywatcher EQ-6R Pro

Filters: Optolong UV/IR Cut

Capture Software: Sequence Generator Pro

Processing Software: Astro Pixel Processor, Pixinsight and Photoshop

Exposures

102 x 600s UV/IR Cut

162 x 120s UV/IR Cut

Total of 22hrs