M81, or Bode's galaxy, is one of the most recognizable and frequently photographed deep sky objects.  However, this image has a good "revenge" story behind it.  It is a replacement for an ill-fated image taken from a good dark site in 2015, which you can find toward the bottom of my gallery.  I broke my Lodestar guide camera during that session in 2015, just one week after buying it.   I got the USB cable tangled around my leg at 2 AM, and the camera was severely damaged.  Somehow, I was able to solder the tiny pins back to the circuit board and keep using the camera, which was miraculous.  I then processed the image somewhat poorly, and accidentally exported it to a low-quality JPG that shows posterization in the arms of the galaxy (which is still in my gallery).  I would have re-processed it if I didn't copy all of the data onto a USB mass storage device, and then knock it off the kitchen table a few days later.  All of the raw fits files were lost, and I didn't have the stacks on my computer, just the lousy posterized JPG.  A couple of months later, I returned to the dark site to discover the area had been closed down due to the discovery of bubonic plague (no joking) in the prairie dog colony right across the road.  When an imaging project is cursed, it's REALLY cursed!   The "revenge" aspect to the story is that the very same Lodestar camera is still alive and ticking, and it performed all of the autoguiding work for this image seven years later!  Also, I did not get the plague.

The other interesting story behind this image is that it's a pseudo- first-light.  While I have been using my C11 EdgeHD for many years and I have had a QHY268M since June, this image is their first work together.  I am sorry to say that there are terrible optical problems with this system, which were more than ordinary sensor tilt troubles.  I thought I had the tilt minimized based on some initial shots through the Red filter, but it turned out that as I moved to green, blue, and luminance, the stars on the left side of the image became progressively more elongated.  I cannot tell whether I have a collimation problem, coma, optical aberrations due to the reducer, or some kind of clipping of the light cone by the imaging train.  It might be all of the above.  Whatever the case, the stars on edges were the ugliest stars I have seen since I started imaging in 2012.  I spent hours and hours massaging the image to make the stars round and eliminate ugly color aberrations.  I still had to crop 20% or so off the edges in the end.  I'm not submitting this for Top Picks consideration because the image isn't a fair representation of what came off the camera, even if it looks good at a glance.

I can't continue with this setup unless I want to crop every image and spend hours mucking around with ugly stars.  I am now wondering what to do with my gear for the rest of spring galaxy season.  I might move the QHY268M to my 4" refractor and shoot some widefield images, which will give high-quality star shapes and colors at the expense of aperture and focal length.  I could alternatively try putting the QHY268M onto the C11 EdgeHD without the 0.7x reducer, so I'd be imaging at f/10 and 2800 mm.  This latter idea might not make sense because I already have a QSI660ws working with the C11 at f/7, and the new QHY camera would give only a slightly larger field of view at f/10.   I'm therefore leaning towards doing a "4-inch APO Deep Field" for the start of galaxy season.