I’ve had a chance to add a couple of exposure hours of M81 and it’s neighbour M82, the Cigar Galaxy (on the right in the wide-field image.) The pair was one of my first targets when I picked up astrophotography last year.
M81 is 96,000 light-years in diameter, and the supermassive black hole in its centre has 15 times more mass than the black hole of our home Milky Way galaxy. Bode’s galaxy interacts with the nearby Cigar Galaxy, causing it to form new stars 10 times faster than the star-birth rate in the Milky Way galaxy.
The light in this photo is truly ancient – these photons travelled for 12 million years before reaching my camera. This is 5 hours of exposure collected at f/5.9 over two nights, almost exactly a year apart, from my yard in Victoria, BC.
