M81, Bode's Nebula

Is described here in Wikipedia.

M81 is a spiral galaxy about 12 million lighht years distant in the constellation of Ursa Major. It was really too big for the sensor on the camera.

I imaged it with the 16" Meade and SBIG ST-2000XCM one shot colour CCD camera. 8 frames of 5 minutes exposure were captured using CCDOPS software. This was also used to calibrate the light frames and to stack them into a final image which I then further processed in Photoshop CS3.