It's open season for Galaxy Hunters.
Here's an image that I took a few weeks back of the well-known galaxies M81 and M82. These are really a nice pair to view through the eyepiece. In my 12" SCT, I can fit them both in a wide-field eyepiece such as a 31mm Nagler. They have unique shapes, M82 is called the "Cigar Galaxy" because of its long, rectangular shape. M81 looks like an oval cloud.
This image was taken on two separate nights and the camera was oriented differently on each, so I had to crop it down to include only the overlap section. Click Here to see a larger version and more information about the image.
There is a tiny smudge above M81, at first I thought it was just a processing artifact but upon further research I found that it is a dwarf irregular galaxy known as Holmberg IX.
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