M81 & M82 remastered

Yeah, there has been an awful lot of this pair here lately...the post-processing is as much a part of learning this game as the scope is, though. Here is our pair once more, but with each galaxy exposed more evenly, and with a cleaner background. Since each object was being handled on its own, it isn't necessary to amplify the background a huge amount to bring out detail in the target objects.

Note that I tried to avoid making the background truly black...not only does that lose the faint wisps of many distant stars, it's never seemed right to me-the sky isn't black to begin with. All in all, for three months now sepnt trying to learn this art, as well as all the repair work, I am not ashamed to give myself a pat on the back for this one.

For those that care, this is a total of 491 30 second exposures (yes, over six hours.) North is to the right. (Generally, I leave North up, which would seem the obvious choice...but astro pics are most often shown with north down, since many scopes invert the image. First, I figure that any "up" or "down" is an artificial thing anyway, and second, Newtonian telescopes with a camera in the prime focus don't invert the image; that only happens when lenses are used, and there are none in my system; only mirrors. So I can put north anywhere I want it to be, just be turning the scope in the mount.) M81 seems somewhat brown and ruddy to me, but I was using the Hubble image of same as a color reference; can't argue with that. While I had some links to info about M82 a couple of weeks ago, I haven't said much about M81. In the middle of the lovely soft-looking center bulge is a black hole of over 70 billion solar masses. For such a pretty thing, it's in reality an incredibly violent place.