The Whale Galaxy - NGC 4631

[silentrunning]

Imaging conditions were pretty good last night, transparency was about average but it was very still, not a breeze. Guiding was as good as it gets. 

I needed to catch this object before it transited as my setup is narrow field with an OAG and finding a star requires a fair bit of planning and rotation of everything hanging off the back end which I try to avoid if possible, instead I try to find another object that has a guide star that will allow me to reuse the current positioning. Very lazy and a practice I need to give up on as 9 out of 10 objects do not have a candidate guide star in the same position as the current object!

So I had about 2 hours before the whale hit the meridian and I managed to image on two consecutive nights giving me just over 3 hours in total. 

The Crowbar Galaxy was in the frame as well but i'm finding them really hard to process together so for this one I cropped out the whale and worked on it alone.