Some processing fun on a very soggy Astronomy Day ...
Saturday May 5th was Astronomy Day. Our club had a busy day scheduled. We were going to open the observatory from 12 to 5 pm for Solar Observing and various other activities. A small group was leading a group of local Girl Scouts through a badge workshop. Finally, we had our monthly Public Night event. Mother Nature had other plans. We canceled the 12 to 5 pm Astronomy Day event due to persistent rain all day. We did use the time to clean and organize the observatory. The Girl Scout badge workshop went on as planned (just no observing) and we never cancel Public Night. We had one visitor, and I think that person was a friend of a member.
One of the members of our club's imaging special interest group (The Tuesday Night Imagers) had collected data on M82 on Sunday 4/27 with our club's telescopes. She collected data with both the Celeston 14" Edge HD and the Tele Vue NP101is. Collecting data with only a UV/IR filter and some data with a Dual Narrowband filter. I copied the data from the 14" telescope to my portable hard drive and transferred it to my laptop. I had joined via Zoom and a few other members participated, but had to leave early. I fired up PixInsight and started processing it. I connected my laptop to one of our large screen TV's and we worked on the data as a group. I drove but many of the choices made during the processing came from the other members that participated. In particular one of our members who is an experienced astrophotographer and a meteorite hunter/collector. It was a lot of fun, and the resulting image is undoubtedly different from what I would have come up without their input. Here's the resulting image.
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| M82 from the BMO on 4/27/2025 - Group process |
Processing:
I'm going to keep this pretty high level. too much time has elapsed for me to accurately describe all the steps we used. Basically, data from both the UV/IR Cut filter and the Dual Narrowband filter was loaded into WBPP with all calibration frames and pre-processed. This resulted in two master light frames that were registered to one another. Both master lights were processed up through making them non-linear. We then split a clone of the Dual Narrowband data into separate channels (R, G, & B). We treated the R channel as Ha and added it to the UV/IR data. We also fully processed the unsplit Dual Narrowband data. Ultimately, we blended both images together with the image blend script.
What is it?
Messier 82 (M82) is also known as The Cigar Galaxy. M82 is an example of a peculiar galaxy. It is also a starburst galaxy. It had a relatively recent (astronomically speaking) encounter with its neighbor, M81. M82 has been disturbed as a result of this encounter. We can see this in the dust lanes and heavy star formation.
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| An annotated image of M82 |
How Big is it?
M82 has a size of 11.2 x 4.3 arcminutes (1 degree is 60 arcminutes) on the night sky. It is about 40,200 light years in diameter.
How Far is it?
M82 is located about 12 million light-years (ly) from Earth.
How to find it?
M82 is a popular target or visual astronomers and astrophotographers. For visual observation, larger aperture, a night with no moon, and dark skies always help for galaxies. I would recommend a low power (wide field if view) eyepiece. With my 24 mm Tele Vue Panoptic and my 8" f/6 Dob, I can get both M81 & M82 in the same field of view. Ust eh following steps to find M82 (and M81):
- Find the Big Dipper.
- find the Bowl Stars Phecda & Dubhe (Note: Phecda is the Star where M109 is indicated in the finder chart below)
- Draw an imaginary line from Phecda to Dubhe
- Extend the line through Dubhe roughly the same distance as the Phecda/Dubhe line
- M81 & M82 should be in your eyepiece or an optical finder scope
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| Finder Chart for M82 |
