With the sky being so nice tonight (and having a strong desire to think about something other the barbaric events in London) I decided to try and get a picture of the supernova in M51. So I rolled the roof off of my observatory and used the C-14/ST-10XME to shoot this unguided 60" exposure of M-51 at f/5.5: http://www.trilobyte.net/paw/temp/M51SN001.JPG That's a stretched version and the SN (arrowed) seems to show up pretty well. Looking at the raw image, however, showed me why we've been having so much trouble eyeballing it through a telescope. The SN is located right in the middle of a very dense and bright part of one of the spiral arms. It was only after stretching the image to tone down the background that the SN seems to be visible. I say "seems" as the on line image I found shows a fairly bright star right next to the SN so I guess the only way to tell if my suspect is the SN for sure will be to take another image in a few weeks after the SN has subsided. Patrick