M81 and M82 on March 20, 2010
Pretty nice night. Pretty clear, a few high thin clouds passing every once in a while, and the air was fairly still. The temperature was around 60 the whole time I was out. The seeing is generally much better when it is cool and crisp outside, but it sure was nice to be out with out having to wear ten layers.
Here is an image of M81 (in the center) and M82 (to the left) I took last night.
This image is a stack of 18 2 minute exposures at ISO800 with my Nikon D60 through my AstroTech 66ED.
The polar alignment routine on the Celestron GOTO is pretty slick. I do a manual rough polar alignment using the polar alignment scope in the mount, then I do the two star alignment with a calibration start, then use the polar alignment on the hand controller to get it dialed in, then reset to the indexes and do another 2 star align – even though this process takes a bit of time, you do end up with a pretty good polar alignment.
I took the time to get a good polar alignment, but did not feel like setting up the laptop and everything for the guide camera. I was not going to do any imaging at all, but since I did have a a pretty good alignment and it was clear, I decided to go ahead and attach the camera to the 66 and take some shots while I observed visually through the C8. The alignment was good enough that out of the 20 2 minute exposures I took, 18 of them were good enough to stack. Next time I will set up the autoguider and try for longer exposures.
I also took a few exposures of M66 and M65, but I have not finished stacking and processing them yet. I will probably post them in a few days.
