A Test Sketch of M81

Friday night was clear with very good transparency. I finished re-doing my TPoint calibration and, as part of that, confirmed that polar alignment is still good. Then did a new, larger, data collection run for periodic error correction. Something still not right there — the uncorrected error was higher than it should be (although not high). Corrected it’s fine, but I still hope to get to the bottom of what’s going on there.

Autoguiding is also working fine now — not incorrectly calibrating on hot pixels — since I set up dark-frames and hot pixel elimination for the guide camera.

So, last thing before the sky went hazy, I did a test run of M81, just for fun. This was 6 5-minute luminance frames.

Anyway, it’s a pretty image. I think I’ll keep it, add data and colour, and work it into a finished product. Not right away though: this object has almost rotated behind my tree, and I’ll soon lose it until autumn.