Bode’s Galaxy – M81

I have revisited this galaxy in 2020 and took a image with long duration of 19 hours. (43 images of 20 minutes each for Luminance & 9 images each of each color of 10 minutes each).

One of the brightest galaxies in planet Earth’s sky is similar in size to our Milky Way Galaxy: big, beautiful M81. This view reveals M81’s bright yellow nucleus, blue spiral arms, and sweeping cosmic dust lanes with a scale comparable to the Milky Way. Scrutiny of variable stars in M81 has yielded one of the best determined distances for an external galaxy — 11.8 million light-years.

Took this image  in March 2016 of 10 hours.

m81-1

Update 2024

With the arrival of wider field telescope Stellarvue SV130, I decided to image both galaxies together and I happened to chance upon intergalactical gas clouds, especially around M81.

That was primarily possible because I took 64 images of 10 minutes each in Luminance. So even though there were just 15 images each of the 3 colors (of 5 minutes duration), the 10+ hours of capturing Luminance data brought out all the gas clouds outside this galaxy.

 

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