M81 - Bode's Nebula

Lying in Ursa Major this Milky Way sized galaxy is one of the brightes galaxies in the sky and is an easy target with a small scope, often seen in conjunction with it's edge on neighbour M82. It has a very interesting dust lane running through the core. This may have been caused by a previous interaction with M82. It is thought to lie about 11 million light years away.

Date:8th and 9th February.

I had lots of problems capturing this image. The first night was quite cloudy and the signal I was getting was nothing like as good as on the 9th. I was also having big problems with the guiding due to some stupid oversights on my part. I had to reject about 30% of my subs. M81 is poorly placed in my sky owing to light pollution so sub exposure times had to be kept short.

Scope: William Optics FLT110 and ZS66 for guiding.

Camera: SXV H9 with SXV Lodestar guide camera.

Mount: Takahashi EM200.

Filters: Astronomic CLS and type II RGB.

Capture and processing details: The luminence subs were mainly 3 minutes but some of the early ones were 2 mins owing to heavy light pollution. About 3 hours worth of useable subs. RGB binned x2 R 44 secs, G 40 secs and B 56 secs - Around 120 of each.

Captured and combined with Maxim and processed in Photoshop.