M81 Bodes Galaxy and M82 Cigar Galaxy

I spent some time at my favorite dark site this spring taking some images of M81 and M82. These two are in a gravitational dance as they are close enough to have each affected the other's shape and composition of one another. NGC 3077 was also captured but not featured in this framing. It's entirely too tiny for my focal length.

Equipment List

• Losmandy GM811G
• Stellarvue SVX102T
• PlayerOne Poseidon Color Camera with Sony IMX-571 sensor
• Off Axis Guider
• UV/IR Filter
• PlayerOne Xena M Guide Camera

Aquisition

• Lights: 60 Sub-frames at 120s 125 Gain and 20 Offset.
• Darks: 25 frames at 120s
• Flats: 25 frames at 0.44s
• Flat Darks (Dark Flats?): 25 frames at 0.44s

Processing

Image Processing was done in PixInsight using their wonderful Weighted Batch PreProcessing Tool. This is a compilation of scripts to do everything from calibration all the way though background normalization.

• WBPP
  • Master Dark Generation
  • Master Flat Generation
  • Light Frame Calibration
  • Cosmetic Correction
  • Bad frames rejection
  • Image registration
  • Local normalization
  • Image Integration
  • Auto Crop
• Post
  • Dynamic Background Extraction
  • SPCC
  • EZ Deconvilution
  • EZ Denoise
  • Screen Stars Script
  • Histrogram Stretch
  • Export To Tiff
• Photoshop
  • Adjust exposure
  • Adjust contrast
  • export to jpeg

Acknowledgements

• Thanks to the folks who are maintaining the EZ Processing Suite for Pixinsight.
• Thanks to Bill Blanshan for his ongoing support of the Screen Stars Script