M82 + Astrodoc Ron Brecher + Optolong LRGB

M82 + Astrodoc Ron Brecher + Optolong LRGB

Credit: Astrodoc Ron Brecher (Canada)

 

 

M82 is a rather famous irregular galaxy in Ursa Major, the Great Bear constellation, which is easily observed through the eyepiece of my 10″ f/6 reflector. Of course visually it is just a grey smudge, not the beautiful, colourful object shown in this image.

M82 lies about 11 to 12 million light years away, and has a diameter of almost 41,000 light years. It has a high rate of forming new stars, and is known as a starburst galaxy. It’s a neighbour of M81, lying just a million light years apart, as shown in this image of the two taken several years ago. A couple ofvery distant galaxies are identified in the annotated image of this field. I’ve presented this image with south up because I thought it looked best that way (most of my images are displayed with north up).

 

 

 

►Tekkies:
Acquisition, focusing, and control of Paramount MX mount with N.I.N.A., TheSkyX and PHD2. Primalucelab low-profile 2″ Essato focuser and ARCO rotator. Guiding with PHD2. Equipment control with PrimaLuce Labs Eagle 4 Pro computer. All pre-processing and processing in PixInsight. Acquired from my SkyShed in Guelph. Data acquired under variable moonlight and average or worse transparency and seeing between February 19 – March 5, 2024.

Celestron 14″ EDGE HD telescope at f/11 (3,912 mm focal length) and QHY600M camera binned 2×2 with Optolong filters.

142 x 1m Red = 2hr 22m
140 x 1m Green = 2hr 20m
132 x 1m Blue = 2hr 12m
98 x 5m Ha = 8hr 10m

Total: 15hr 04m

Image scale 0.4 arcsec per pixel