Sunflower Galaxy Debut

[The-MathMog]

I'd been struggling with gettings subs longer than 60 seconds unguided, as I had to throw away over half of them. I suspected that it was due to periodic errors with the gears or similar with my Celestron AVX. I am using a 2.25 barlow, so my 130slt OTA was very prone to small errors. I looked into doing PEC training, and performed that on this night, and oh holy grail if that didn't produce miracles! I had only done two trainings and averaged them, and I then went from doing 60 second subs, and throwing half of them away, into doing 180 seconds unguided subs without hardly throwing any of them away! This really made me grin like a maniac that night, as it was just like flicking a switch and everything worked perfectly!
So I immediately went to shoot a new target, which became M63. I had looked for galaxies to photograph and this one looked very appealing to me, from the images I found. I ended up gathering a total of 42 subs (+ the ones I ended up throwing away due to satellites, focus slip, dew on secondary etc), and 25 subs! There is still a lot of aspects I can improve on, but the simple fact that my capabilities took such a leap on one single night, simply amazed me, and definitely made up for the weeks on end that it has been cloudy/too windy! My polar alignment was very good that night, so I could probably have pushed it more, but I thought I should rather stay safe, and learn gradually.
Processing is also something that still needs quite a bit of practise. I did like 5-6 versions of this one, and this is the one I liked the best of them.

42 Subs
180s Exposure
2 Hours 6 Minutes light data
25 Darks
Iso 6400
Celestron SLT 130 OTA + Celestron AVX Mount
Baader 2.25x Barlow
Nikon D5200
Nikon Backyard, Stellarium, Photoshop CS2

[Jannis]

Thats a really nice capture there!

Quite sharp and lots of details, especially when concidering the relatively short total exposure and equipment used (and even unguided if i understood well?)! 

Edit: I think you've also managed to just capture the Supernova 2017dfc!

[The-MathMog]

9 hours ago, Jannis said:

Thats a really nice capture there!

Quite sharp and lots of details, especially when concidering the relatively short total exposure and equipment used (and even unguided if i understood well?)! 

Edit: I think you've also managed to just capture the Supernova 2017dfc!

Thanks a lot, still a long way to go with both capturing and processing but it's getting there!

Weather have been terrible for months now here in Denmark, so I am lucky I even managed to get two hours. If it isn't cloudy, it is too windy. But there seems to be a few nights coming up, so I might add more data to it there. Better take the opportunity before the "astro dark" disappears for good until August, which happens in a few weeks :/

Yes, it is unguided. Before I did the PEC training, as mentioned even getting 120s subs was almost impossible. The Celestron AVX "ASPA" seems like a very powerful tool too if you do it several time. I tend to check with a drift align afterwards too, but normally I don't have to make adjustments for these exp lengths