After an abortive effort to find NGC 2403 in Camelopardalis (it’s very difficult to locate things when there are no bright stars in the vicinity and you’re lying on your back peering through a reflex sight) I switched to M109 in Ursa Major. This is conveniently located next to gamma UMa (Phad). The sky conditions were superb and a 5 minute test exposure showed little trailing so I went ahead and shot 1.5 hours worth at ISO 800 with the Canon 350D.
This was the first time I’d attempted 5 minute exposures on the Astrotrac at a focal length of 420mm using just the polar scope but it worked very well. If I’d had more time then it would have benefited from a drift alignment but that’s still a whole new learning curve.
Looking at the resulting image in Aladin I identified galaxies down to mag 16 (UGC 6840) and some MGC galaxies as faint as mag 17 although I haven’t included these on the image here. Not too bad for a 70mm refractor.
