Just over a moons width away from M81 lies the galaxy M82, also in Ursa Major. With a really dark sky both are visible in binoculars as faint smudges. In space, the two are about 150,000 light years apart and are part of a galaxy cluster that is about 12 millions light years distant.
A bright moon and high haze limited imaging to bright objects on Tuesday evening but I did get a picture. I also determined that I had some issues with the imaging process, more on this below.
After the imaging run I noticed that the camera was set to jpeg rather than RAW image quality. After some work I traced this to a ‘fast mode’ setting in the capture software. Now that I’ve isolated this problem, next time out I should get some rather sharper, lower noise images.