M-81
This is a large and beautiful spiral galaxy, 10' long and 4' wide, oriented NNW-SSE. It has a bright core with a stellar nucleus, and spiral arms can be seen, especially with averted vision.
M81 is one of the easiest and most rewarding galaxies to observe for the amateur astronomer in the northern hemisphere, because with its total visual brightness of about 6.8 magnitudes it can be found with small instruments. Brian Skiff of Lowell Observatory reports that he could see M81 with the unaided naked eye under exceptionally good viewing conditions (i.e., clear dark skies), and is at least the fourth observer who reported to have done so!
The pronounced grand-design spiral galaxy M81 forms a most conspicuous physical pair with its neighbor, M82, and is the brightest and probably dominant galaxy of a nearby group called M81 group. A close encounter occurred between the galaxies M81 and M82. During this event, larger and more massive M81 has dramatically deformed M82 by gravitational interaction. The encounter has also left traces in the spiral pattern of the brighter and larger galaxy M81, first making it overall more pronounced, and second in the form of the dark linear feature in the lower left of the nuclear region.