Messier 82

[fivemack]

This is a starburst galaxy in Ursa Major; it's a spiral galaxy, viewed edge-on, with an enormous cloud of dust in front of it.

Sum of two 90-second exposures at ISO 1600 with 2250mm-focal-length f/4.5 giant telescope; I took five, but for three of them the wind was blowing hard enough to disrupt the telescope guiding and distort the bright stars into unusably strange shapes.

The apparently odd-shaped star in the top left is HD85161, which does have a companion star in the position that appears on this picture. It's surprisingly hard to find on-line star catalogues comprehensive enough to tell me how bright the faintest stars appearing in this picture are; ones which are over-exposed to the point of saturating at the centre are around magnitude eleven (IE a hundred times too faint to be seen with the naked eye), which makes sense since the big telescope collects about ten thousand times as much light as the naked eye does.

Comments

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

Have you tried SIMBAD? It doesn't have everything, but it has a great deal. The Hipparcos catalogs were intended to be comprehensive to the limits of that mission, but that's objects of 10th magnitude and brighter.