Alright, I'm happy with this one
After putting 4.5+ hours in on M81 & M82 and being underwhelmed with the result, I'm so glad that M51 turned out better. I'd done a quick test on it during a full moon, just for a lark, and was surprised by the detail saw in 11 minutes of washed-out exposures, so I figured it was worth spending some time on.
I came back to this during the epic week of clear nights we had in early April and managed 3 more nights, totalling about 4.25 hours. I thought it was in the bag until I discovered that a BUG wandered all over my lens, stopping to rest right next to M51 for a good portion of the final night of imaging. So I tossed those exposures and tried my luck under a 69% moon, and I was able to recover the lost time plus a bit.
For reference, this was scaled up 1.4 x with a droplet size of 2px in Astro Pixel Processor, and then tightly cropped to include only the brighter companion galaxies. I discarded 10% of the exposures, so it's just under 5 hours integration time, total. After so many hours outside and such a steep learning curve since I started this hobby 5 months ago, I think I'm allowed to be pretty pleased with the result, and I'm excited to share it!
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