Having visited Astrofest I spoke to my good friends at Orion Optics who kindly offered to re-silver and service my VX14 as part of a purchase of an Advanced Astrograph 12 (AG12). The AG12 has a carbon fibre tube and a corrected field flattener based on the Wynne Corrector giving a very flat field view. Coupled with my QSI 683 I have taken the opportunity to photograph M101, a spiral galaxy about 21 million light years away in the constellation of Ursa Major.
The image above consists of 10 luminance subs at 960s and 1×1 binning combined with 5 red subs at only 60s and 2×2 binning and the same for green and blue. Bias, darks and flats were used to calibrate the subframes in Maxim DL (software that I would highly recommend). The final LRGB masters where then processed in photoshop using a high pass filter and then finally combined into the colour image.