Here are CCD images taken on April 4th 1999 from my back yard in San Jose CA with an ST7 CCD camera and a 4" Takahashi refractor . This time I tried combining more images than last time (about a dozen 75 second exposures each). Here are the results for two objects, M101 and M109. I planned to do more objects but the clouds started rolling in. I found out that more exposures makes for an incredible improvement in signal to noise ratio!
April 7, 1999: Reprocessed images with flat frames.
M101:
M109: