M81 and M82 make a popular pair of galaxies, they’re close enough to have a good presence in a single field of view and they’re different from one another to provide some nice shape and color contrast. The images above are the result of several imaging sessions. The basis is a three-panel mosaic done with just a luminance filter to create the canvas for the rest of the image. Color data comes from similar three-panel mosaic using red, green and blue filters and the hydrogen-alpha data was added from the two end panels.
The last bit is the Integrated Flux Nebula, or IFN. That’s basically a fancy name for a huge cloud of dust and gas that’s illuminated by the combined light of the stars in the Milky Way. I captured the IFN a few months earlier with a wide-field refractor but was able to add it here by carefully aligning the stars.
The three panel mosaics were imaged with Utah Desert Remote Observatories’ PlaneWave CDK12.5 and an ASI6200MM Pro monochrome camera. The IFN was imaged with our Takahashi FSQ106 and the same ASI6200MM Pro camera. The data was processed in Deep Sky Stacker, PixInsight and Photoshop.