A Weekend of Firsts

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I'm tired. I've stayed up into the wee hours for the last two nights and had a blast! My first target of the weekend was Saturn, since it was in opposition this week. As I was waiting for the ringed planet to clear some trees, I took a test shot of Jupiter. I could see right away that the atmosphere was quite active and the final image isn't the best, but I caught the Giant Red Spot and the shadow of Io in the cloud tops. Both were firsts from my driveway vantage point.

Red Spot on the left, Io's shadow on the right.

Saturn came next, but the air was definitely getting worse. I was able to eek out this blurry shot. Its rings are tipped towards earth and completely hide the southern end of the planet.

The ring's Cassini Division is barely visible in this blurry photo.

I packed it in by 11:30 pm and I thought I was done. Then the mailman showed up with my new guide camera Saturday morning! I'd been fighting with a QHY5L-II-M for a while. I don't know if it's the drivers or Windows 10, but I can't get an image out of it (it seemed to work before the fall Windows 10 update though). I opted for the ZWO ASI120MM-S, a USB 3 mono camera that turns out to be popular enough that it was back-ordered for a couple of weeks. 

So out I went Saturday night, guide camera in hand. My original intention was to make sure the software worked and tear down early. But I ended up getting an extremely good alignment on the scope and found the Whirlpool Galaxy. 

Guiding fired up and images were captured.

My only disappointment was that I didn't get the entire companion galaxy, NGC 5195, in the shot - and my capture settings were just plain wrong. But guiding worked flawlessly and held the telescope on target. Even with the bad settings and the light pollution, I was able to scrape this image out of an hour's worth of data:

Whirlpool Galaxy, with NGC 5195 barely in the frame.

With the software and hardware coming together, it's only a matter of time before I start making better images. I'm pretty happy with what I accomplished over the course of the last two nights!