M82 is known as the Cigar Galaxy, a name which can be forgiven, as visually the red Ha "explosion" is invisible to the eye. Photographically, I cannot think of a better name than the "Exploding Cigar", as it does appear to be some sort of insane cosmic joke that went way wrong!

M82 is a starburst galaxy with an incredible rate of star formation (about 10X the rate in the core as in our own Milky Way core), a result of an unprecedented violent  interaction with its partner, M81. Since M81 is so much more massive, it is M82 that bore the brunt of the encounter, while M81 goes on with little apparent perturbation. Aside from the impressive emission in Ha, those exploding gases produce strong emission in X-ray, IR and radio frequencies (not shown here). A good general overview of the physics behind it, as well as the Hubble Image, can be found here.

The 60 second raw images were all taken through with my color ZWO ASI2600MC Pro camera, calibrated, registered and stacked in DeepSkyStacker, processed in Startools, then final adjustments in layers in Photoshop.  This is a combination of my imaging with an L-eNhance HO filter in 2022, but now pared down to the best 27 hours, along with the best 17 hours with an L-eXtreme HO filter this year. The 2022 data was taken with my Celestron f6.3 reducer, while the 2023 data is with my newer Starizona f6.3 reducer. The image scales do not match, so scale adjustments had to be made. Each data set was separately processed in DSS and saved as 32 bit tif files. In Photoshop I manually adjusted them to match both in scale and orientation, and then added them 1:1. The 1:1 addition seemed appropriate as the 2022 data had more integration, but the 2023 data less background Poisson noise, so overall both had similar S/N.

The combined image was processed in Startools, with separate processing for the galaxy and the stars. In Photoshop the stars were removed from the galaxy image, and the galaxy removed from the star image, using StarXterminator. The galaxy was deblurred using AFP-R and denoised/sharpened with NoiseXterminator. The star layer was added to the galaxy using Linear dodge (add).

Tempting as it is, I am done with M82, my next attempt would need to be another 44 hours. I would do it, but as  I approach the "magic" 65 I don't think I have the time...