These are the most distant objects I’ve ever imaged! Light from their stars traveled through space for roughly 11 million years and miraculously avoided absorption before hitting my camera in Houston.
The bright cigar like object on the left is a galaxy known as M82. The faint spiral structure on the right is the galaxy M81. These galaxies have remarkably bright cores, and I could see them visually with my 80mm telescope. I even saw them during the framing process with only 5 seconds of exposure. Below is a screenshot of what i saw on my computer immediately after lining up on the targets.
Detecting objects during the framing process is pretty rare! So that is a good sign.
The biggest challenge in the project was pulling out the spiral arms of M81. These arms are much dimmer than the bright core and so I had to simultaneously amplify their signal while not saturating the core. This sounds simple but it took quite a bit of time.
These galaxies lie in the direction of Ursa Major near Polaris. This means shooting north which for me is in the direction of one of biggest metropolises in the country. There is a thick red haze that stretches up about 30 degrees from the horizon. At the time I took this picture the targets were around 56 degrees above the horizon. Nonetheless, there was still a detectable gradient caused by light pollution. I didn’t use my light pollution filter though! Light pollutions filters are more effective when used with nebulas that radiate at certain frequencies outside the artificial light spectrum bands. A galaxy is made up of countless stars which radiate across the entire visual spectrum (like our sun). Therefore, a light pollution filter would just block a portion of their light along with the artificial light. Also, light pollution filters shift the color balance and make them look blue.
Below is the entire frame before I cropped it. The fuzzy spot on the lower right is galaxy NGC 3077