4h15m of M81 and M82 (and others) from last night.

[pipnina]

The good weather continues and so I recharged my camera's batteries and set sights for M81 and M82 last night. I hoped to get in the order of 6 or more hours of images from it but at some point the 130-PDS impacted the tripod leg and it lost tracking, then the camera battery ran out, so I got just over 4 hours in the end. I'm relatively happy with the result though, looks relatively clean and free of my camera's usual defects (I shifted the mount by a minute or so after 2 hours). I should probably look into investing in pixInsight to get pictures like this in a better state since I think editing is my big bottleneck right now, next to my camera being unsuitable (hence no red plumes coming from M82 )

I used Aldebaran, and Procyon to test my focus and tracking, not the greatest images but nice star fields anyway, or so I think...

And of course a single 30-second exposure of M42, because it's impossible not to while it's still here!

 

I hope you guys had similar luck last night with the sky! And perhaps better luck than I with equipment 😛