Inspired by Chris's capture of this cool spiral I thought I'd grab a shot of it with my DSLR and Tamron 500mm mirror lens. Shouldn't be too hard, just point the lens at Alpha Doradus and take a few shots in the vicinity and surely one frame will show it there. Unfortunately I was using an iOptron Sky Tracker and without GOTO, I just couldn't find it. I thought I'd found it so I shot 75mins worth of subs but it turned out to be NGC 1617.
A couple of nights later, I had another go with a SW Esprit 100 and a ZWOASI 120mms camera. I nailed it with the GOTO on the HEQ5pro this time but it needed a 2 star alignment to center it on the 120's small sensor.
The galaxy's core and inner spiral arms are quite bright and I was able to take 30 sec subs, 30 of them for each RGB filter. Background gradients were difficult to remove, especially with the limited data but I was happy just to see the shape of this nice spiral, even under Bortle 6 skies. Would love to have another go with my 8 inch but it's heading toward the west and it won't be sitting well in the sky from my location to achieve a good result.
