M81 and M82

19:24 21/11/2005 UTC

This is merely a practice image for combining exposures from two different sessions. I built a luminance image from my earlier shot of these two and three longer exposures taken from the dark sky location (under half lit moon though). Color layer is combined from all (including ones with tracking errors) five images taken last night. The end result has also core masking to bring out the dust lanes in brighter parts of the galaxy. There's still noise in the outer arms of M81 but the spirals are quite nicely visible. The orientation between the sessions caused some tight cropping, but I managed to get them in same image. No guiding was used, just PEC, which was trained using a crosshair eyepiece.

Camera: Canon EOS 350D (Rebel XT) | Telescope: Orion Optics Europa 200mm f6 Newtonian reflector | Mount: Orion Skyview Pro, Boxdoerfer PowerFlex MTS-3SLP drive controller | Exposure: 7x90s ISO1600 + 3x180s ISO800 f6 for luminance and 5x180s ISO800 f6 for color, darks, no flats | Software: IRIS, GIMP | Location: 60°31'N 26°52'E (Koivula/Kotka,FI), (Anjalankoski, FI)