After figuring everything out with my new equipment, I set up for a real target, Bode’s galaxy and the Cigar galaxy. Just east of Polaris that day, I figured I could get a ton of images of it. I set up the scope to take five hours of exposures at three minutes each. It ran successfully over night, doing an unattended meridian flip and precisely reframing the image.
With the excellent tracking I was getting, I left more resolution in the final image. Deconvolution and tone mapping really brought out the detail.
