Friday night was very cold and fairly clear – just a few high thin clouds passing through every so often. I was out for a few hours and had the chance to take a few images with my new AT66ED scope that I picked up a month or so ago.

I was able to get scope pretty well aligned fairly quickly and then I was really just focusing on, well, getting decent focus with the my D60 through the scope. A few weeks ago I picked up a
Orion 12.5mm Illuminated Reticle Eyepiece. This was the first chance I had to try it out and it really helped in getting the goto aligned.

Besides just taking some time to observe, I was just trying to get a feel for taking images with the new scope. Here are a couple of the images I captured and I think these are some of the best I have done so far.

Check out the image I got of the Andromeda Galaxy, M31. I actually took about 20 minutes worth of exposures but only 4 of the 2 minute exposures really came out well enough to stack. You can really start to see the dust lanes in our large neighbor. The satellite galaxies M110 and M32 are also both visible in this picture. I can’t wait to image this again.

Andromeda Galaxy - M31, M32, and M110 - 8 x 2 Minutes, ISO400

Then the Pleiades or M45, this image could still use some work, but it is the first stack of images that I have taken of the star cluster where you can really start to see some of the blue nebulosity around the stars in the cluster. The Pleiades will definitely be a target of future observations and images.

M45 - Pleiades, 10 x 2 mins ISO400

Original sizes of the above pics can be found on my flickr page here.

I also spent some time visually observing M42 and several other targets in Orion, such as the Horse Head and Flame Nebula. I was able to make out both of these in the eyepiece but not with very much detail. Again more targets that I cannot wait to spend some more time on.

Mars rose in the east sometime after 11:00 or so and I spent a little time checking out the red planet. I will spend more time checking Mars out again.

Friday was a great night for star gazing. While I was out I also saw one really bright Geminid meteor streak overhead. The rest of the weekend has been cloudy and rainy.

Just a quick thanks to Flintstone Stargazing for the Quick DeepSky Stacker Tutorial, very helpful in setting things up to stack my images. I was not able to “Mosaic” mode for some reason, just showed streaks through the images, but in “Standard” mode I was able to produce the images above by following his other guidelines.