April 18, 2020: 2 hours on M101

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

I decided to give M106 a break on this fourth clear night without a moon in a row. Aimed for M101 instead. I used the usual set-up of the Meade 6" F/5 Schmidt-Newton with ASI183MC, on the Vixen GP-DX mount. Somehow I couldn;t get tracking sorted to my liking so resorted to very short subs (20 s) and lots of them (360 + the 3 single framing shots). APP has stacked this load overnight, and I must say it came out better than I was expecting.

It is of course too noisy, and more data are needed, but I feel that for just 2 hours from a Bortle 5 location, this isn't bad at all. This scope and camera frame this particular galaxy reall well too.

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Made a slight tewak in curves using GIMP, just to brighten the image a bit.