Bodes Nebula and the Cigar Galaxy

It was finally clear last night, so I shot a pair of galaxies.

M81 (Bodes Nebula) is 12 Million light years away and spans around 90,000 light years across.

M82 (the Cigar Galaxy) is 12 Million light years away. It is a Starburst galaxy and makes stars 10X faster than our galaxy. The bright core is exploding with Hydrogen gas (the red areas in the center).

I decided to see how my mono camera with filter wheel works with the RASA 11. I was wondering if the large filter wheel would affect the image too much or not.

It looks like it will work fine with the filter wheel and also with my normal filters. So I won't have to buy the expensive 2" "fast" filters for this scope. Some of the stars are very slightly out of round, but I think I can fix that with making a mask to sit in front of the filter wheel.

Anyway, here is the photo. This is an integration of:

Lum: 200, 20 second images
Red: 48, 45 second images
Green: 48, 45 second images
Blue: 48, 45 second images
H-Alpha: 40, 90 second images

Celestron RASA 11
ZWO ASI183MM Pro
EQ6-R Pro
ZWO ASI290MM MIni Guide Camera

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/2ith​VaB

so this represents about 5-6 hours of shots integrated for the final product? Is this manually performed or do you have a programmable tracker?

Lum: 200, 20 second images: 4k secs 1.1hrs
Red: 48, 45 second images: 2160 secs .6hrs
Green: 48, 45 second images: 2160 secs .6hrs
Blue: 48, 45 second images: 2160 secs .6hrs
H-Alpha: 40, 90 second images: 3600 secs 1hr

Yes, it is just under 4 hours.

I use an Equatorial Mount that turns the same rate as the earth spins. To make it even more accurate, I have a separate camera and small scope that is called a "guide camera". This guide camera locks onto a single star and corrects the mount to sub-pixel tracking accuracy. It is really neat what you can get now for not a whole lot of money.

Here is my setup, inside my observatory I completed about a month ago in my backyard (all homebuilt).

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/2ija​768

Really nice image, and setup!

Very nice capture and edit . Super nice rig setup and observatory . Is the dome from a kit ?

Colorado CJ wrote in post #19010233
Yes, it is just under 4 hours.

I use an Equatorial Mount that turns the same rate as the earth spins. To make it even more accurate, I have a separate camera and small scope that is called a "guide camera". This guide camera locks onto a single star and corrects the mount to sub-pixel tracking accuracy. It is really neat what you can get now for not a whole lot of money.

Here is my setup, inside my observatory I completed about a month ago in my backyard (all homebuilt).

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/2ija​768 New RASA 11 by Colo CJ, on Flickr

That's a really sweet setup!

Beautiful image. Such detail!
Congrats on the observatory. That makes me a bit jealous!

Wonderful image. I really like the dome.

Details of how you located and sourced all the toys needed? Costing? Looks like an extremely solid rig.