The “Little Pinwheel Galaxy” was the first major galaxy to come up for me this year after M81 and M82. This project was more of an experimentation with different tweaks on the scope. I was able to get guiding to improve overall, and I flocked the inside of my coma corrector to try to reduce bad backgrounds caused from light pollution reflections. I haven’t figured that out all the way yet, but I did make some improvements over the bad backgrounds of my last few images. Three clear nights yielded 14 hours of data.
Here is an annotated image showing all of the background galaxies:
