My plan for the night was to practice getting a good polar alignment and then check out a few deep sky Messier objects.

I was able to get the scope aligned on Polaris fairly quickly, then I used Deneb and Caph as the alignment stars and then Betelgeuse as a calibration star. Alignment Success!!! I typed M42 into the Goto hand controller and the scope slewed right to it – and it was fantastic!

Spent the next couple hours checking out M42, M31, and M33. The tour button on the Celestron hand controller showed me M34 and M82.

I used my 32mm, 25mm, and 15mm Plossl eyepieces, the best views of the night were with the 25mm.

Here is a pick of the Celestron C8S-CT set up in my backyard.

Celestron C8 with Dew Shield

If you check out the picture real close you can see the frost forming on the scope. Told you it was cold! The Astrozap dew shield did a great job at keeping the scope clear up until just before I called it a night.

While I was out I saw two very bright meteors. One nearly directly over head at about 10:15 PM that was very bright and one that was in the west about 11:30 PM that was not quite as bright. Very cool.

Hopefully the cool clear nights will continue through the weekend.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

From Celestron’s Knowledge Base:

Rough Polar Alignment

Accurate Polar Alignment

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From Sky and Telescope – DIY Accurate Polar Alignment
Sky and Telescope also has a bunch of other great Astronomy DIY articles.

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Observatorio ARVAL – Polar Alignment
This is an article on aligning a Meade LXD55/75 scope, but the general procedure holds true for all equatorial mounted scopes.

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There are many more if you do a quick search on Google, but these are a few that I read and found helpful.  Celestron’s KB is actually a great place to find a lot of good information, not just about Celestron scopes, but about amateur astronomy in general.

If anyone else knows of any good resources for how to polar align your scope, feel free to add them to the comments.