M81, Bodes Galaxy

[gary1968]

This is my latest effort in astro imaging. I find this a particularly difficult object to image as it is soo faint. Anyway, here it is... 3 hours worth of data made up of a mixture of 5 min, 10 min & 15 min subs. Taken with Orion 8" F4 Newt, Canon 1000d, CLS clip, HEQ5 guided with ZS66 and Meade DSI Pro.
This object is 12 million LY from us in the constellation Ursa Major. It is a face on Spiral Galaxy. This at the moment is my Nemesis, I will do it better just not sure how yet.......
C&C welcome as usual folks.....

Gaz

[codachrome]

Re: M81, Bodes Galaxy

Wow another great shot......

Coda

[colin C]

Re: M81, Bodes Galaxy

Superb.

I couldn't even do that with Photoshop!

Colin

[Muscat]

Re: M81, Bodes Galaxy

Looks pretty good to me well done and thanks for all the details which I find very informative

[DaveH]

Re: M81, Bodes Galaxy

Impressive stuff Gaz

DaveH

[MX5]

Re: M81, Bodes Galaxy

Very nice ... how many layers did you take?

[gary1968]

Re: M81, Bodes Galaxy

It is not built in layers as such. I had 4 x 15 min subs, 6 x 10 mins subs and 12 x 5 min subs. I put them all into Deep Sky Stacker and ended up with a stacked image. This was then opened in CS5 and I tweaked the levels and curves, that was the result.
If I knew how to work with layers in CS5 I would have stacked the 3 different exp's individually and then built up the image in CS5. This would have the benifit of the longer subs to get the faint detail, and the shorter ones so that the core does not look burnt out, which it does in my image above. The resulting imae would have been smoother, I would have been able to push the fainter regions a bit more without burning out the core.
I really need to learn how to work with layers....... :-)

Thanks for the kind words folks, much appriciated.

Gary

[DeeGee]

Re: M81, Bodes Galaxy

WOW.