M81 - Bodes and Cigar Galaxies

[JimFox]

My Astro sessions have been snuffed out by either wildfires, the monsoon weather or my old Jeep having issues. So I grew desperate and looked back through some astro images I captured in April and found a set of images on M81 that I hadn't processed yet.

I would say that this is probably my best capture of M81 so far. It's totally not perfect, but there is a level of detail I am able to get now with the new mount and the new astro camera that makes me really happy.

60 Light Frames @ 120 secs and Gain 100
20 Dark Frames
20 Flat Frames
ASI2600mc Pro (Astro Camera)
iOptron Gem28 (Astro Mount)
Tamron 150-600mm @600mm

Stacked in DeepSkyStacker
Processed in Photoshop

All comments are welcome,

Jim

 

[CRTAstro]

Great job Jim !

You've captured the core nicely there with the exposure and gain combo that you have chosen. Great to see you are getting the results with the new cam ! Are you using a filter with it ?

 

[Ben Egbert]

Looks very nice to me Jim.

 

[JimFox]

Great job Jim !

You've captured the core nicely there with the exposure and gain combo that you have chosen. Great to see you are getting the results with the new cam ! Are you using a filter with it ?

Thanks Carlos! I am probably at a point to switch to Pixinsight to get better detail. But for now, I want to focus on the mechanical aspects of using the new gear and getting more confident in that, before I tackle Pixinsight.

 

[JimFox]

Looks very nice to me Jim.

Thank you Ben! It was fun to see such nice detail coming out of it compared to what I was getting with my D850. Before, the Cigar Nebula was basically just cigar shaped object with color. But now I can actually see details in it. And I think that's so cool.

 

[Mike Lewis]

Yes, I can vouch for how frustrating it can be when you have no new data

This is nice as there is some good definition and details in the arms without having blown out the core of the galaxy. That is always a balancing act.

ML