BBC Sky at Night Magazine Deep Sky Tour

A change from my usual way of doing things. Tonight I followed the March 2019 edition of the Sky at Night Magazine Deep Sky tour, in Canes Venatici and Coma Berenices. I looked at the following object by taking a 120 s  exposure, no stacking. Having found the most interesting looking one, I then took 240s exposures (around 2 hours worth) and processed that in the usual way.

NGC 4565 The Needle Galaxy

NGC 4559

NGC 4274

NGC 4656 The Hockey Stick or Crow bar Galaxy and NGC 4631 The Whale

NGC 4244

The next is 240s x 24 :

NGC 4274 and friends

Via Astrometry.net, this can be solved as follows:

Leo Triplet

This is the first image taken with the Skywatcher ED80 in a while. Had a few problems getting the  Celestron CG5 GT mount to track anything like accurately, so that I could use guiding. The problem seems to be the cabling was too tight, the mount wasn't  'East heavy' (so the gears are in constant mesh) and maybe other things since  the tracking is still not as good as other people get. I need to save the pennies and get a NEQ 6 Pro I think!

Anyway, this pic is based on 170 x 60s lights, and the usual flats, darks and bias. I think the gradient is caused by some ambient lighting (I have a red light on in the 'shed' (= Observatory!). Mental note to self - turn it off!

Triplet of Galaxies in Leo

The Leo Triplet (also known as the M66 Group) is a small group of galaxies about 35 million light-years away in the constellation Leo. This galaxy group consists of the spiral galaxies M65, M66, and NGC 3628.

While I was waiting for the Triplet to cross the meridian, I also took a few exposures of the Whirlpool Galaxy:

Whirlpool Galaxy 

The Whirlpool Galaxy, also known as Messier 51a, M51a, and NGC 5194, is an interacting grand-design spiral galaxy with a Seyfert 2 active galactic nucleus. It lies in the constellation Canes Venatici, and was the first galaxy to be classified as a spiral galaxy. Its distance is estimated to be between 15 and 35 million light-years.