M81 and M82, Bode's Galaxy and Cigar Galaxy

That's another take on the galaxies I tried to image last year, about the same time.

It's such a pleasure to see how data takes form in the image, and the visual progression of quality is great.

At first, I was impressed to see the M81 and M82 through my camera from Bottle 8/9 skies at all. But now, I understand, that total exposure makes huge difference in the result you get.

The more data you collect, the greater your resulting image becomes: you have some room to throw away subs that are not that great (I use .4 criterion for integration and rejection) and work with better data to get better results.