Welcome to the eighth edition of our User Story series.

This time, we're featuring Luc Studio (@lucstudiophotography) and his stunning capture of the M81 & M82 galaxy pair.

Before Shooting 🤔

This shoot took place at one of my favorite spots close to my hometown. I was fortunate enough to grow up in the countryside with a beautiful night sky rated Bortle 3.4.

I’ve been thinking about shooting the M81 & M82 duo for some time but couldn't find the right time, as spring is fairly cloudy in the region where I am.

But when I finally had an opening, even though the moon was at 60% (bad… very bad), I decided to try my luck.

The challenge was getting enough exposure time. This is a faint target that requires long focal lengths. This image was captured at 480mm with a 40MP sensor, while the entire setup weighed around 3kg, making it a very demanding setup.

Small gusts of wind, or even someone walking near the tripod, can cause trailing and blur. Losing one frame usually means sacrificing 30–40 seconds of exposure on a target that requires close to two hours of total integration time.

📸 The Shoot

After finally setting everything up and making sure the alignment was correct, I let the camera run with interval shooting until the battery was almost depleted, leaving enough power to capture some calibration frames.

This brought me right around the 2-hour mark.

This is honestly an impressive feat of the NOMAD. Keeping such a heavy setup accurately framed at these focal lengths for two hours without adjustment is a testament to the stability of this tracker.

I had full trust in it and let it run without checking constantly, which helped me save precious exposure time.

(Editor’s note: We love the confidence 😄 While NOMAD is designed to provide stable tracking, we still recommend checking polar alignment every 20–30 minutes during longer sessions for the best results.)

💻 After the Shoot

I ended up with 4500 seconds of total exposure time. At first, I was worried it wouldn’t be enough, but I decided to process the data anyway.

This was also my first time using Siril (I usually stack with Sequator), but after some research, the stacking process went surprisingly well.

Now comes the biggest part of deep-sky photography: processing.

I spent a lot of time in Affinity Photo to make the data as clean as possible, removing noise while preserving the delicate signal. This is how I achieved the final image, which I am very happy with considering the total exposure time.

✨ Quick Tips

My biggest tip would be to spend time achieving the best polar alignment possible using the polar scope and an app like PolarFinder Pro.

This is the most important step to reaching longer exposures for deep-sky photography, where around 60 seconds often becomes a sweet spot for individual sub-exposures.

Also make sure your polar scope is properly calibrated and centered. The precision wedge is a lifesaver and makes these shots possible.

⚙️ Gear List