M82 - Cigar Galaxy (2022)

Messier 82 (M82 or NGC 3034) or more commonly known as the Cigar Galaxy is an edge-on galaxy approximately 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. M82 is very close to another spectacular galaxy M81 or Bode's Galaxy (a.k.a. NGC 3031) which it is often imaged with. Another nearby galaxy NGC 3077 along with M81 and M82 form what is known as the M81 Local Group. The tidal forces from the largest of the three galaxies, M81, is causing the central portion of M82 to have a star formation rate 10 times that of the Milky Way. This can be seen in the red hydrogen strands emanating from the center of the galaxy.  Getting those streamers was one of my goals and is also one of my favorite parts of the image.

M82 is a very popular object which is usually done every couple of years, however, the last time I did this was five years ago. Why so long, poor FOV and not enough focal length. This is much improved from my previous attempts - Yay, I have improved. I started this in the front lawn since we had a freak warm spell. We had a snowstorm a few days later so I dug a path for my Scopebuggy and collected some good data but the bricks which the buggy rested on froze to the ground so I had to hammer them off and then carefully drag the Scopebuggy over the frozen ground - it was a pretty funny site but not to be repeated. The following nights I found a new location on my driveway that gave three hours of imaging time - good enough.

One particular night I had horrible streaks on two hours of subframes and was thinking my mount was broken. It did not occur to me that the 18 mph plus wind gusts would affect the EdgeHD800 with the dew shield that resembles a giant sail. I got some weather data from a nearby airport and did some analysis - pretty enlightening. I made a video of my findings: 

Link Here: https://youtu.be/72Ec1SzgQ1E.

Processing took my usual way too long but in the end I am happy with what I ended up with.  The very cool red steamers emanating from the central portion show up very well.  I used the IDAS NBZ dual band filter (Ha and OIII) to start with but then decided to get some straight RGB data with the Optolong Luminosity. The RGB data was quite detailed and easily blended the stars into the Ha-OIII image. I tried to do straight blends, split dual blends, split RGB blends but nothing seemed to work. So in the end I did several small incremental galaxy blends to incorporate the RGB galaxy with the one captured with the NBZ filter. Though the Luminosity data showed a lot of detail, it was much noisier than the data collected with the NBZ filter - the background was extraordinarily smooth from the beginning.

M82 - Cigar Galaxy
Dates: 2-20, 2-21, 2-25, 2-26, 2-28, 3-3
Camera: ZWO ASI294MC-Pro
Telescope: Celestron EdgeHD 800
Barlow: None
Focal Length: 2032mm (native)
F/10 (native)
Focal Reducer: Celestron .7 Reducer Lens
Mount: Orion Atlas Pro
Filter Adaptor: ZWO Filter Drawer
Filter: IDAS NBZ (2-inch) and Optolong Luminosity (2-inch)
Focuser: ZWO EAF
Autoguiding: ASI120 Mini attached to an Orion ST80
Exposure: NBZ 153 x 180, Lum 230 x 90

Gain: 139
Offset 0
Temp: -20 C
Processing: Asiair app, PixInsight, Photoshop, Star Exterminator, Topaz DeNoiseAI.

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