I briefly convinced myself that I had imaged the pinwheel galaxy near Ursa Major. After a couple of hours hard looking though I realized that I had lost focus and the smudge i was exclaiming over was really an 86 uMa, a magnitude 5.7 star that’s sort of in the right direction from the dipper but not really.
I went back to first principles and plotted a wide angle shot vs what i could see in stellarium then followed my zooming in as I gradually lost the plot.
My problem is that I often can’t see much until I load the images onto the PC and brighten them. So I take a ton of pictures, load them up and scan them and I’m like “ooh, a smudge!”
Oh well, I’ll probably keep trying the pinwheel because it’s always high in the sky but i may have to wait for andromeda to be more visible toward the end of summer.
Astrophotography Newbie 