A new addition to my photography hobby. A lot more work than capturing terrestrial images.

This is Bode’s Galaxy and is known as M81. The galaxy is about 11,800.000 light years from us and is estimated to contain more than 200 billion stars. We can’t, for the most part, resolve stars in a distant galaxy, so the stars you see in this image are extreme foreground stars in our own galaxy. The image represents over 15 hours of integration time and was taken with a monochromatic camera using R, G, B and Luminous Filters. The open “shutter” time was about equally distributed among the filters, and no single image was more than 120 seconds. The finished image is a “stacked” product of over 1,100 images taken over six nights.