My first deep sky image and the rocky road there.

Even though I am still a passionate moon photographer, I am of course impressed by the great pictures of the Deep Sky colleagues.

Since we had very good weather and seeing in April and above all a stable weather situation over Central Europe, I wanted to take the opportunity to take my first deep sky picture. M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy was a very spectacular subject in April for me.

I hadn't thought it would take three tries.

The first attempt failed due to incorrect camera gain setting, catastrophic polar alignment and incorrect PHD guiding settings. Although I had found M51 directly with the SGPro plate solving, PHD continuously lost the Guide star. I gave up annoyed at about 1 a.m.

The second time, two nights later, it took me a lot of attempts to find M51 at all. The guiding didn't work again. The graph was at both Dec and RA like the Rocky Mountains. I had to restart the sequence again and again after losing the guide star. Most of the few subframes I could create were blurred. I assume that the focus did not match either.

Giving up is not an option!

Since I suspected that the Dec axis of my mount might be too stiff, I disassembled it before my third attempt and made it smoother.

After very precise polar alignment, focusing and guiding settings with the help of the PHD guiding assistant, I then started the third attempt. Despite a bad guiding graph with about more than +/- 2.5“ for RA and Dec, the sequence ran stably up to the meridian flip. After that, PHD unfortunately found no guiding star. After noticing this late I had to resume the sequence manually. Next time I will use the PHD Meridian Flip Calibration Tool. (There are so many things to think about... :-))

In the meantime, I have disassembled the mechanics including the RA axis of the mount and made it smoother, because I believe that this is one of the reasons for my bad guiding. I have saved the guiding graph as an image version. May be you can see what is going wrong.

After previous manual preselection, I stacked 48 out of 60 subframes with DeepSkyStacker. The stretching was done with fitswork, the denoising with Topaz Denoise AI and the final image editing with Lightroom

Even though I am of course happy about my first deep sky image, I believe that there is still a lot of room for improvement. I am looking forward to your critical feedback and recommendations on what I can do better.