M81 and M82

The fine weather continued on the following day, the 18th March 2026, (now over a week and a half ago) and I wanted to find another target for observation. The book "The 100 Best Astrophotography Targets" by Ruben Kier (Springer 2009) is a very good book for gaining ideas about what to photograph. This time I decided to go for the galaxies M81 and M82 in Ursa Major (see page 82 of this book). These galaxies are found up near the head of the bear and not far from the star 24 Ursae Majoris. This time I took two sets of images on the Dwarf 3. One of 136x15s using the astro filter (first frame 23:01 UT and last 23:42 UT) and one of 201x15s using the duo-band filter (first frame 22:00 UT and last 22:59 UT), both gain 60. The ones with the duo-band filter were to capture the red emission light that can be seen in M82 due to the burst of star formation in that galaxy. Here is my resulting image:-

 

M82 (the Cigar Galaxy) is at the top of this image and M81 (Bode's Galaxy) is at the bottom (to obtain a better view please 'click' on the image). The majority of this image is the set of frames which used the astro filter. Just a small portion of this image around M82 is using the duo band filter. Both sets were processed in Stellar Studio with auto parameters. The combined result has been binned x2 and the saturation and sharpening increased in Photoshop. Here is a close up of M82 at the full resolution of the Dwarf:-

 

The strange shape of this galaxy becomes more apparent. M81 and M82 have gravitationally interacted about 20 million years ago and this has caused the deformation and burst of star formation that you see. In deeper images the red light appears to be exploding outwards either side of the galaxy from the centre. Here is a close up of M81:-

 

This is a very nicely defined spiral galaxy and, interestingly, contains an active galactic nucleus resulting from a black hole of 70 million solar masses. What can also just about be made out in this image is another much fainter satellite galaxy of M81, Holmberg IX or UGC 5336. This is a faint but fairly large dwarf irregular galaxy.

All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2026