The Suffolk Sky

M82 on 2/13/09

Friday night Mary Shannon and I spent a few hours looking at the stars. We checked out the Orion nebula, several open clusters that were pretty easy to find, and Saturn. She got a kick out of the things that we could see. I was actually pretty surprised that it held her attention for the several hours we were out in the cold.

After a bit of looking around, we focused our attention on M81 and M82. I wanted take some images to see what kind of difference the focal reducer (Celestron f/6.3 Reducer Corrector for C Series Telescopes) that I just got would make when taking prime focus pictures. It makes a lot. We took about 20 1min ISO 800 exposures of M82 and 5 1min dark frames. When I processed the images using Deep Sky Stacker it would only stack 7 of the images.

The result is the most detailed image that I have taken of any deep sky object. Check it out.

M82 - 7x1min - ISO 800 - 5 Dark Frames

We were going to go out and look again lastnight, but some high clouds started to roll in. Hopefully there will be clear skys tonight.