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M101 without the fireworks, Tom Gray

M101 without the fireworks

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Acquisition details

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Description

My first effort at M101 which took me over an hour to find. Due to poor polar alignment, and despite my ArgoNavis 'push to' digital setting circles, the pointing accuracy was way off. Eventually I just used my Telrad to eyeball the right position and searched with small 9x60 finder/polarscope - a 1 min exposure allowed me to centre the image.

The sky conditions were awful, with intermittent high cloud and haze making the seeing even worse - we are between multiple weather fronts and storms here in UK. Eventually I managed 2 x 15m exposures with autoguiding, but no star tracking, resulting in fairly poor image alignment in Envisage. Heavy handed processing in Startools resulted in this bright but grainy image - plenty of room for improvement in everything!

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M101 without the fireworks, Tom Gray

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