M101 take 2

[vineyard]

Hello,

So after my first galaxy experiment on M101 with a PL72 a few weeks ago, I went back with my TV102iis this week.  Took 105 lights x 120s over 2 nights.  Unfortunately something must have gone wrong the first night b/c DSS refuses to use any of those.  So the image below is best 80% of 50 lights from the second night (so only 1h20 worth of data in this image).  Following advice from @vlaiv and @wimvb on my M81 processing attempts, this is undrizzled & resampled to reduce size.

Not great (but an improvement on the PL72 image ).  Still scratching my head on why the first night's lights are being rejected buy hey ho, "computer says no" as they say.

The galaxy itself is not anywhere near as crisp as I'd like it.  And this image has had to be heavily cropped to remove the amp glow.  I did take darks but the ones I took at the same temperature only got taken as 8-bits for some reason so I've had to use older 16-bit darks that were at a slightly higher temperature.  Seeing the glow & the variability, I think a cooled OSC is definitely top of my wish-list now.

I also took about 3 hrs on M57 so that's the next processing butchery coming up 😄

Stay safe all,

Vin

[vineyard]

Here's the same image but without being taken through GIMP (with just some sharper work in PI).  I think the non-GIMP version is better?

[vineyard]

So I was really unhappy with my butchery above.  Spent a lot of time looking at Light Vortex Astronomy pages (v helpful!) for my M57 attempt posted separately.  And thought I'd try again on M101 (practice in technique if nothing else).  Still nowhere nearly enough data, but there are a few more clear nights hopefully coming up

Stay safe.