M82, The Cigar Galaxy

Is described here in Wikipedia.

A neighbour to M81, this is an active galaxy in the same group, about 12 million light years distant in Ursa Major.

I imaged it with the 16" Meade and SBIG ST-2000XCM one shot colour CCD camera. 7 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.