My mistake was using sub-exposures that were too short. Even with modern CMOS cameras, the read noise can drown out super-faint signals. My 10-minute subs just weren’t enough to pick up the detail I was after; 30 minutes would be more appropriate. Live and learn!

Still, it’s a cool image. I’ve never gotten that much depth on the tidal tails of this thing, nor as much detail on the Hydrogen clouds within it.

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I’ve imaged these many times over the years; in fact M81 was one of the very first deep sky objects I attempted to photograph like 10 years ago.

I’m happy with this year’s take on it! Now that I’m imaging under darker skies of central Texas, I can finally bring out the “IFN” – Integrated Flux Nebula. This is gas just outside of our own galaxy, illuminated by the collective starlight of the Milky Way! As you can imagine, it’s very dim, and wasn’t even discovered until around 2003. There’s a lot of IFN in this part of the sky; it’s the gray wispy stuff in the background.

I also integrated some Hydrogen-alpha data into this image, which made the red Hydrogen areas pop a little more. That includes the huge jets spewing out of the Cigar Galaxy, as well as star-forming HII regions in Bode’s Galaxy. This was my first time using the “continuum subtraction” technique to make the Hydrogen-alpha integration more precise.

Here’s the pretty cropped version:

And, the original wider field, showing more of the IFN:

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Maybe this isn’t the prettiest object in space, but it’s among the most interesting when you really look at it. The “Embryo Nebula” is a star-forming area, and you can really see it happening here. Those red streaks are Herbig-Haro objects, jets of gas shot out from spinning disks of gas that will become new solar systems. You can see the light of young stars blasting through the surrounding dust. And a nearby blue star lights up some of the gas, looking as though it was spat out from an orifice in the cloud of dust all of this comes from. Surrounding the nebula is lots of brown dust – if you’ve seen edge-on pictures of other galaxies, you’ll notice brown dust lanes going across them. That’s what you’re seeing here, but within our own galaxy.

Roughly 17 hours of total exposure, just in natural colors – no narrowband false color stuff, this is what it really looks like!

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Formally LDN1235, this is actually a much larger object that extends further off to the right there – but I couldn’t fit it all in my field of view. Next year I may try to expand the image, but it’s already getting a little too late in the season to image this one further.

This is all natural colors by the way. No narrowband or false color stuff here.

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First let’s have a look just in natural light:

If we add in some of that Hydrogen gas collected through a narrowband filter, some of that red ionized light becomes visible:

And here’s an earlier take, with more exaggerated colors and a little more artsy.

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Focusing in on the “Tadpoles” makes for a more interesting image, but here’s the wider field shot it was cropped from, which is also fun to explore. (Click on the image for the full resolution version)

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And here’s a narrowband take on this same object. Notice that the structure of its core is a little different in this view; we’re only seeing ionized gases emitting their own light in this “Hubble palette” image of ionized Hydrogen, Sulphur, and Oxygen.

And just for artistic purposes, here’s that same image with the stars removed. This makes it seem a little more abstract and artsy:

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What I really geek out on, though, is the wider views here – there are so many other galaxies in the background! Zoom in all the way, and explore.

Shot over 3 nights – processed without noise reduction.

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Although it’s known as the “seven sisters,” in fact it’s a cluster of a thousand or so stars – and most people see six stars with the naked eye, not seven. Whatever.

The cool thing though is the gorgeous blue reflection nebula this cluster lights up, which emerges with long exposure astrophotography! The processing on this image was very light – apart from the usual calibration and correction steps, there is just a tiny saturation boost on this. It really looks like this.

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