Astro-Shed

This week we bring you the companion galaxy to last week’s target, Messier 81, commonly called “Bode’s Galaxy.”

M81 was discovered in 1774 by Johannes Bode and then cataloged by Charles Messier again in 1779. It sits in the Northern area of Ursa Major, or more commonly known as the Big Dipper. It is a difficult target for me as the roll off roof of my observatory rolls to the North and M81 skirts along the roof as it rotates around the pole.

M81 is an absolutely beautiful grand design spiral galaxy with fully developed spiral arms. Visible along these arms are dense areas of star clusters and nebulae. The arms themselves have a noticeable blueish hue as compared to the more central core area. This is typical in spirals as the arms have younger, hotter and thus bluer stars than the central areas which tend to have older, redder stars as the star formation occurs for the most part in the arms.

The most amazing thing about this image is that it was only about 42 minutes of integration as the cloud cover crept in before the sequence was completed. This is a good candidate for more integration as I suspect there is more detail within the arms that should be able to be revealed. This image was captured with my Celestron 8″ SCT with a 0.63x reducer, a ZWO ASI533MC Pro camera and an UV/IR filter. 14×3-minute subs.