Bode’s galaxy, M81, on the left is a grand design spiral galaxy about 12 million light-years away. Located in the constellation Ursa Major, it is commonly viewed along with the Cigar galaxy, M82, on the upper right. The Cigar galaxy is classified as a starburst galaxy and is some five times more luminous than our own Milky Way galaxy. 

This image was made with a Nikon Z7 and a Nikon 400mm f/4.5 lens with a 1.4x teleconverter for a 560mm f/6.3 combination. A total of 88 40 second exposures at ISO 3200 were made for a total of 58 minutes of exposure time. Star tracking was with a Fornax LighTrack II. Deep Sky Stacker was used to produce aligned tif files that were then sigma-clip averaged, stretched, and color corrected using Python code. Some final image processing, including noise reduction with Topaz DeNoise AI and some curves adjustments were done with Capture One.