Bode’s Galaxy M81 is a great target for galaxy season in the northern hemisphere. It is high in the sky rather close to the NCP which makes tracking easy and keeps it visible for a long time during the night. It is one of the few objects where a lot of fine-structure can be seen inside the galaxy. The whole area has a lot of faint dust that my image below does not capture.

This image was done with a Celestron C8, the original 0.63x reducer/corrector and an ASI533MC (uncooled). Everything was mounted on a Skywatcher HEQ5 (with Rowan Belt Mod) together with 15 kg of counterweights on my backyard pier. Integration time is almost 14 hrs.

Raw stack from PixInsight can be downloaded here. It was calibrated with bias and flat frames. Standard settings from WBPP (2024) were used, incl. CFA drizzle at scale 1. It is slightly oversampled. This is 275x 180s at gain 101. Although I am generally not a fan of AI tools, I used BlurXTerminator for this image.

My processed imaged with details can be found on Astrobin. You can read about the this galaxy here on Wikipedia.