This was an amazing project to be apart of. Image data was shot from two side of the planet; here in the US and from the UK. Special thanks to Luke Newbould for allowing me to do a collaboration with him on two of the most beautiful targets in our night sky, the Bode's and Cigar Galaxies, or M81 & M82. To keep this post simple, Luke shot 19 hours of this target from both moon and moonless night skies from his bortle 7 location in northern England. He used a 10" Newtonian @F4.7 and at a focal length of 1200mm, with his ZWO ASI 2600mc camera using an IR cut filter . I managed to shoot 28 hours dealing with the same moon and moonless sky conditions but from bortle 8 skies here in southeast Texas. I used a Takahashi 150B @ F7.3 and a focal length of 1100mm and collected data using a Baader Moon & Sky Glow filter and some shots using an IR cut filter. I too used a ZWO ASI 2600mc camera so that our cameras matched for this project.
Interesting enough, no matter how much data we collected, fighting the light pollution was very difficult. The minute you remove light pollution from the stack, we lost all of that hidden detail that you would normally see from a dark sky location. However, it didn't matter; to be able to see the beauty of these two targets was still amazing, and to also see the many other satellite galaxies within this image was truly eye opening. I would love to revisit this target again from either a dark sky location and/or using my 2600mm mono camera; maybe a part-2 video coming soon.
This is my version of the data we collected.
Please follow Luke on his Astrobin page
https://www.astrobin.com/users/LukeNewbould/ in case he posts his version of the data and also follow his YouTube Channel. This guy has a lot of interesting projects coming up so please make sure you watch. Thank you!!
My new YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd2mU-7-Gz4Lukes YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9bqU1HlnlE
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