M101 - Pinwheel Galaxy

It’s that time of year for clouds and precipitation here, so I’ve only had a couple clear nights since my last run (which was M97 in late February!). On those couple clear nights between then and this image of M101, I tinkered with the scope setup; trying my hand at planetary imaging. I was able to successfully do some live stacking of Jupiter, Mars, and the moon craters in SharpCap, but nothing worth sharing yet… I will certainly say it was fun hopping around and looking at the planets and moon craters up close, though the process was much more “hands on” than DSOs! Unfortunately, it seems as though planetary season has come and gone for me now, and I look forward to trying it again sometime.

I also tried shooting DSOs with NINA on the mini PC during this time, but I think there’s a bit more of a learning curve to get up and running with NINA than I expected. I spent a few of the cloudy nights inside, making sure all of the software and hardware setup was as done correctly. Once I got it running and had a clear night, I then struggled quite a bit with dialing in settings on PHD2 for guiding (It was showing 1.6” RMS at best, and 2.3” RMS at worst). On top of that, I spent some than expected trying to figure out how to navigate around NINA. I’ve followed several tutorials for it, but it doesn’t feel intuitive to use for me yet. Given there’s so few clear nights this time of year, I’m going to pause on trying to use a mini PC with NINA for now, and stick with the ASAIR+. It’s already set up and it just works, so I can spend more time collecting data and less time tinkering with the scope.

As promised on my prior attempt of this target, I’ve revisited M101 with more resolving power! (And new tools and a bit more processing experience). This target is challenging like so many others to the north, as they’re toward the most light polluted part of the sky for me. I was further hampered by clouds ruining frames on this imaging sequence: I set up the plan to collect 7 hours of 3 minute frames and ended up with 4 hours. Furthermore, the nearly full moon made an appearance for most of the frames I was able to keep. On the plus side, guiding seemed to have settled into about .5” RMS when I left it to run overnight! Even though it’s not much integration time, I went ahead and processed it anyway, just so I wouldn’t forget how to do it after a little break! I processed this one a couple different ways: first, using my typical approach of separating stars, processing stars and nebula/galaxy separately, and recombining, and second, processing the image with the stars and galaxy together. I ultimately preferred the separated stars and galaxy processing approach and result, but I did end up with fairly similar results when comparing the resulting image from both methods. I’m looking forward to imaging some more… hopefully the clouds break for a bit!