Date:	April 21-22, 2023
Location:	Cottonwood Spring, Joshua Tree National Park
Time	20:00-2:00 (UTC-7)
Weather	clear with light breeze; 60°- 40° F
Bortle Scale	3
Elevation	3,000 ft
Landscape	High Desert

Equipment Used

8″ (203 mm) f/4.9 Newtonian Telescope
Atlas II EQ-G Mount
Orion 50mm Guide Scope w / Starshoot Autoguider
Nikon d5300
Meade Telextender 2X Barlow Lens

The thin crescent moon of course looked lovely, and was a don’t miss target before it set.

Here you can see coma on the stars… which meant my Newtonian mirrors were not collimated.

At first, the night did not go as planned as I wanted to try and image M 101 at f/10, but unfortunately I could tell right away in some of the early images that coma was present, thus the collimation was not quite right… thus I had to perform the task in the dark.

I tried Arcturus again, and upon seeing the coma had been fixed, I was ready to go.

Since both of the Messier objects I intended to shoot were not going to rise in the sky until much later in the night, I went after some familiar targets that I hoped would improve compared to my last efforts shooting them.

When it came to M 5