M101 and a question

[rickstanners]

Now that I have just about finalised my guiding set up, I took the opportunity last night to actually do some proper imaging, and this is the result. Nearly 4 hours' worth of 5 and 10 min subs, then subjected to my usual amateur processing in PS

I would be grateful for suggestions as to how to improve the image. Should I just add more subs, or try for some even longer ones to pull out more colour and detail? I haven't actually added any darks or flats to the image. Would these have a dramatic effect on the outcome?

Thanks for looking

Rich

[rfdesigner]

Nice first effort at a tracked image.

You wanted suggestions:

I've only got one.

It looks like you've got very slight rotation in the image.. if this is just a bit of drift between subs you could process that out by using some rotational alignment of the subs.

thanks for posting

Derek

[rickstanners]

Hi Derek,

Thanks for the comments. I wouldn't be surprised if there had been some rotation. It was a very quick and dirty polar align last night at about 9pm (having had the usual computer related imaging "issues" continually cropping up! )

Rich