After my last picture of M101 I was anxious to see what a little more exposure would do for the image. I got my chance at the beginning of April with a beautiful clear night and exposed 15x 5 minute frames of this area. Leaving the camera on ISO 800 was probably a mistake as it causes the brighter stars to lose colour. In future, I will probably stick to ISO 400 for this length of exposure.
The bright smudge to the right of M101 is NGC 5474, a gravitationally bound near neighbour of M101 and a disrupted dwarf spiral galaxy. The core is offset by it’s interaction with the larger galaxy.
