4AoS has decided to award the prize to Alan.

Posted by: Alan | January 10, 2011 at 03:35 PM
It's M82, which is a galaxy in the constellation The Plough,

(Credit and copyright SkyTools 2 by Capellasoft).
but when it was first recorded by Messier, it was thought to be a nebula, so that's close enough.
Alan, the chocs are even now on their way to you, but given all the recent weather disruption, I can't say when they will arrive, if at all.
Imaging galaxies is many times more difficult than planetary imaging. I spent 7 hours in the garden on Saturday night, and ended up with 6 or 7 galaxy photos.
The first problem is finding the darn things. With a dark sky you can use an atlas to "star hop" from bright stars to the faint ones, leading to the target, but on Saturday, the light pollution was pretty bad and only the main stars of the constellations were visible and it took me an hour just to find M82. This is one of the brighter galaxies but apart from Andromeda, even the bright ones are pretty dim.
M82, also known as the Cigar Galaxy, is Magnitude 8.4 so it would be 15 or 20x too dim to be seen by the naked eye even under a very dark sky, and given the state of the sky at the time, I suspect it was perhaps 40 or 60X too dim.
Also, because I don't yet have accurate guiding systems for the telescope, I can only manage exposures of 20-30 seconds. Any longer than that and objects appear "smeared" as they move across the sky due to the rotation of the Earth. The solution is to take lots of short exposures then combine them using Astro software. This image is a composite of 12 photos selected from a total of around 25. In total, I took 472 long exposures over the night.
As mentioned before I'm shooting at 3200 ISO. This means light is recorded 32 times faster than the slowest "normal" camera setting of 100 ISO.
Total exposure time for this image was around 6 minutes, which is equivalent to a single 100 ISO exposure of over 3 hours!
The Cigar Galaxy is perhaps the most intensely studied galaxy of them all. Due to a close encounter with another galaxy, M81, has been "ripped apart" causing huge disruption and also large scale star formation. (For more, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_82)
Here's the final result, after post-processing in Photoshop. I'm so pleased with it for so many reasons, not least that it's the most distant object I've imaged so far. The Andromeda Galaxy (See here for my oh so dodgy first imaging attempts) is mere 2.2 million light years away, whereas M82 is 12 million light years away. Yes, the light that produced this image set off across space 12 million years ago, long before the existence of humans.
You can see even see the main star forming regions:
Compare this diagram from http://www.inaoep.mx/~ydm/m82/index.html
with my image.

The reddish colour in the A region is just showing here.
As you'll see in the NASA photo at the end of the post, there are jets of material flying out from the dark area at the centre. It looks like one is just visible as a dark line against the background noise in my image. This is odd because as I understand it, this shouldn't be showing up in the visible spectrum.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap060425.html
And these are just a few links to the many research papers on M82:
http://cseligman.com/text/galaxies/m81m82.htm
http://zuserver2.star.ucl.ac.uk/~msw/thesis/chap2.pdf
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0708/0708.0814v1.pdf
Is it the Fat Blob nebula?