After first tests and learning experiences, M64 and M66 are my first serious astrophotography objects.

Even though I am happy with the result, I see issues with the focus (especially in RGB channels), which I only checked once at the beginning of the exposure-series with a Bahtinov-mask. Additionally I am not sure about the colours, i.e. their saturation in the LLRGB-postprocessing. I am thankful for every other aspect, that I could optimize or take care of in the future.

Preliminary, I spent my freetime from January (scope is the birthday present I got from my wife) to April on getting used to the mount, other equipment, polar alignment, Raspberry, EKOS, guiding in general, ... and lastly differential flexure. Below is a short summary of the aspects of my learning curve, that was quite steep, especially because the topics are often interconnected:

- Setting up an Astroberry (Raspberry4 with KStars and Ekos): I encountered some problems with USB3 and the Asi178. Using USB2 at reduced bandwidth and another update of the Astroberry solved the issues for the moment.

- Leveling of the tripod: Learned how important this is

- Polar Alignment: Celestron ASPA was not enough => got used to Drift Align in PHD (Polaris is blocked here). In the end I got PA of (1.5+-0.5)'

- Target selection: focal length (1000 mm) in combination with my quiet small CMOS-sensor resulting in about 26" x 17" FOV quickly drawed me to galaxies. Now I had to look for those galaxies in the right RA/DEC region. Restrictions were my sight to the south and avoiding of a meridan flip during the night. ==> galaxies in the Leo/Com region

- Finding my target(s): got used to directions in guidescope/mainscope (one of the hardest things, since I think "Goto" is kind of cheating. But beeing honest, beeing this so hard, I decided that after I "found" a target one time manually, I am then allowed to "Goto" it using KStars/the mount.

- Finally got the PA and guiding under control. Doing so, I got guiding-RMS of RA: (0.7+-0.1)" and DEC: (0.35+-0.05)". Nevertheless, I experienced elongated stars, what I first tought was the assymetry in the RA/DEC-guiding. But after checking backlash and PEC (see below) I struggled to solve the problem...

- Backlash in the gears: I found tips to tighten the gears. But I decide against this because: 1) the play in the gears is needed in case the mount is used at different temperatures 2) in RA the play is meaningless since the guiding never changed direction 3) in DEC the play can be made meaningless by misaligning the PA (or better, to not make the PA too perfect) to get DEC guide in one direction only, too. Plus: dithering must not be made in DEC, only in RA 4) the tightening would only affect the backlash in the gears and not in the worm, so tightening of the gears is not able to solve the backlash-problem as a whole, anyway

- Anti-Backlash setting in the mount: since there should no change in the direction of guiding, this is not going to have much of an effect. Nevertheless I found a setting for DEC, to help PHD at the turning point in DEC during the calibration. Without this setting, there has been "no south movement" at all during the calibration. But with the setting, I got PHD to report at least "little south movement"

- PEC of the mount: I worked on getting PEC trained with PECTool. However, in the end I found, that PEC did not do well together with PHD. I concluded, PEC of the mount is more for unguided operation. So I did not use PEC (PHD does the work here)

- Differential flexure: All my efforts regarding PA and PHD helped me getting better in those two things and getting smaller guiding-RMS. Anyhow, I saw "hopping stars" in my exposures. What was causing them? Lastly but not too late, I looked closer to the star-hopping. Result: Their direction did not correspont to RA or DEC-axes. Furthermore the amplitude of the hops were about 15px=7"! As this could not be the guiding (RMS was much smaller), I concluded with very helpful input from different forum-entries, that this must be differential flexure. So far so good, but how to solve this? Where does it come from? Do I have to change to OA-guiding? A rough estimation helped me. For a circle of 200mm radius (focal length of my guidescope) the following holds true: 360°~2pi*0.2m >> 1°~6.4*0.2/360 >> 1'~6.5*0.2/(360*60) >> 1"~1µm ==> Result is: the hopps of 15px=7" equals to just 7µm change of the transeverse direction of the guidscope. This is so little, that literally anything can cause this. After busting my head about this, I guessed this could be very likely due to my (to this point, since I thought I am just in "testing-phase") nonexistent cable-management. The very next night I checked this... I set everything up and started the guiding. Then I pulled on the cable of the guide-cam. Result: Pulling ==> Guiding-graph hopped by >>16". Slight pulling (barely touched the cable!) ==> 8" hop! I was so happy! After I managed all my cables I was able to start the first astrophotography project, which were M64 and M66.

- Postprocessing: After testing of bunch of software (PI, PS,...) I decided to use: AvisFV for Checking the FITS before registering and stacking them im DSS. Further processing with StarTools (great pleasure!).

I want to thank the people in the astro-scene for their forum threads, field reports, guides and free software that I was able to find, read and use. Without your helpful information out there, I would not be able to post these first photos. Thank you!