M101 at Near Zenith

Its been weeks since I've had clear skies without a bright moon getting in the way, it was a Friday night and I could stay up all night if I needed to to get some good imaging in. Needless to say, I took advantage of my excellent sky conditions. The target for tonight was M101 in Ursa Major, the Great Bear. Imaging started a little later than I'd liked, as I had some trouble aligning the mount. I'm getting rusty, being I wasnt able to use the scope in some time. Finally I got it aligned, got the autoguider running and started snapping off frames. I took 20 frames, each 5 minutes in duration. I ended up with this image, after processing.

This is a full frame image.  Only the edges have been cropped out due to stacking noise.

After I had finished imaging M101, I opted to try a different object, M57, the Ring Nebula in Lyra the Lyre. I will post an image in a separate post.