When I started with my first exposures after quite a while of mediocre weather in March 2023, I thought it would hardly be worth to continue. The atmospheric turbulences together with the wind blurred my pictures one after the other. After having re-focused the optics I thought it was time to relax in my car. But after checking the guiding of my mount another half an hour later, I could hardly believe that the conditions improved so well and remained excellent throughout the rest of the night...

The barred spiral galaxy M 109 was on my list for this night, a considerbly small object very close to the bright star gamma Ursae Maioris, the lower left star of the big dipper. This star produces the glare to the upper right corner of the frame and the diffraction spike generated by the secondary mirror spider. Some folks encouraged me to manage these artefacts, so I decided to flatten the background a bit. Post-processing is always a balance between what is "real" in terms of raw data that my camera collects and what is "real" in terms of what the astronomical objects look like...