Clear Skies + Warm Temperatures = Hard to Resist!

Saturday night the temperatures were downright balmy.... in the mid 40's.  I set the goal of figuring out how to best (better?) polar-align my mount AND then understand a bit more how my AutoGuider works.  I'd say I made a bit of progress in both areas. =)

Having nothing to do with those two goals ~ I enjoyed photographing a first quarter Moon:

On of the coolest surprises came at the end of the session (my laptop ran out of juice ;)  I waited around for M42, Orion Nebula, to move to a part of the sky where I could photograph it.  I knew I wasn't going to stack photos but wondered what it would look like if I just gathered alot of light all at one time.  I played around with 15 to 30 second exposures and various ISO's  (I can't believe I hadn't tried this before....)

WITHOUT STACKING (without flats, bias, darks)

Finally ~ photos of the Cat Nebula.... Hah!  No, it's my faithful feline viewing buddy, Church :)