The two galaxies can be found in Ursa Major, near the front of the bowl on the big dipper. M81, the nice round one is located about 4.5 million light years away. It is a clasic sprial galaxy. M82 is belived to have interacted with M81 in the distant past and is located around 17 million light years distant. This is clasified as an irregular galaxy. both were discovered by Johan Bode in 1774.

Taken early morning Sunday March 22, 2009. Saturday was cloudly all day, but it cleared up around 10pm. I packed up my scope, mount, camera and all of the other stuff to get a few hours of imaging in. The clouds came back at 2:30 am.

I've been unable to guide in the far northern sky and this night was no different. The mount won't calibrate with the guiding software in that part of the sky. So tonight, I trained the Periodic Error Correct (PEC) on my mount by guiding on a star near Arcturus, while running the PEC training routine. I then used a new Bahtinov focusing mask to focus on Arcturus. That mask makes focusing really easy and very accurate! I'd recomend one to all imagers.

With PEC running I then began to image M81 and M82 using 4 minute unguided exposures. I got 22 shots in before the clouds rolled in. 18 of those were used for this image. A pretty good result for unguided imaging! AS you can see the stars are nice and round.

Details:

Telescope: William Optics FLT110 Lite @ f7
Camera: Canon Rebel XT modified by Hap Griffin
Filter: IDAS LPS
Mount: Celstron CGE
Aquired using DSLR Focus software
Stacked with Darks, Flats and Bias frames in Deep Sky Stacker
Post Process in: PixInsight LE and PhotoShop CS3