The forces of rotation caused red hot masses of stones to be torn away from the Earth and to be thrown into the ether, and this is the origin of the stars.

— Anaxagoras 428 BC

M81 first light

By ebfaulkner6a at Thu, 05/14/2009 - 8:25pm
M81 first light

This is a one hour image composite, 60 x 1 min exposures thru the new Astro-Tech 6" Ritchey Chretien telescope mounted on the Vixen GPD.  I expected more but when you go from 3" ED scope to a 6" RC detail needs longer exposures.  However I did an automatic processing in AIP for Windows and then experimented with additional processing manually.  I will need to get 3-5 hours exposure or more to get more detail.  And experiment with AIP. And I used a diagonal which is a boo boo !