First Light- M81 (TheCharmingQuark)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Ursa Major (UMa) · Contains: Bode's nebulae · M 81 · NGC 3031

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First Light- M81

After a week of sitting patiently waiting for the sky to clear, last night I was surprised to see a totally clear sky. The past two nights before were forecast to be clear on Cleardarksky.com, but unfortunately high cirrus ruined otherwise perfect occasions. Being as this was my first time using my new mount and telescope, I had a little bit of troubleshooting to go through, but after I worked out most of the kinks it was smooth sailing. After a 2 star align with 4 calibration stars and a ASPA procedure, things were fairly close to accurately polar aligned. I did attempt unsuccessfully to use an autoguider with PHD, but I didn't realize that once everything was set up PHD had to calibrate, so that is something to look forward to for next occasion. Once everything was either in order or simply not being used because of my ignorance to PHD, I slewed to M81 to begin capturing photos. Because I wasn't using an autoguider, exposures were limited to 75 seconds which throttled the effective exposure time. I took 48x75 second exposures for a total of 1 hr of exposure time, as well as 24 75 second darks, and 30 bias frames. I believe the dark spot in the upper left hand corner is due to not using any flats, and that is probably something I should do to better the quality of my images. Overall I'm very pleased with my first experience with my RC, I hope to have many more nights of photographing the sky with this telescope.

Original
B
C
Final
D

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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	578240
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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First Light- M81

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