Hypothermic Astronomy

A very cold night, made worse by my mistaking Alioth for Mizar, throwing out the whole alignment.  This was compounded by not being able to focus the guide scope. I have mounted the telescopes on a larger  rail , so that I can balance them better. While doing this I thought I could remove an extension tube (duh!). So, after an hour, scopes finally aligned and focused and aimed at The Whirlpool Galaxy, M51. The moon was half full and in Orion, so the sky as pretty bright. I was limited to 60 s exposures. This image is based on 118 minutes of data. Pretty pleased with it, considering!

Messier 51 Whirlpool Galaxy

Enlargement to show the detail

Everyone photographs it...here is mine!

The best night of the year so far. No moon, almost no wind, dark and clear (and cold!). So, the three targets were:
1. Uranus. Could I identify it ?
2. M78 (unintentional but my mount will not do an automatic meridian flop, so I needed to target something across the meridian for an hour or so until my real target (Rosette) had crossed as well).
3. The real target for the night, the Rosette Nebula in Monoceros.

The results:

1. Uranus ...and Titania! Having checked the position using Astrometry.net, Cartes du Ciel and the Sky and Telescope Moons of  Uranus tool, this is a pretty confident result!

Uranus and Titania in Pisces

2. M78 in Orion. The bonus in this one was to get a bit of Barnard's Loop. At first I thought it was noise, but checking against other peoples (much better) photos, the red on the right is definitely part of the loop. Noisy image though, only based on 11 x 180 s exposures.

M78 and Barnard's Loop

3. La Piece de la Resistance !

The Rosette Nebula in Monoceros.

Under an almost full Blue Supermoon....

Beggars cannot be choosers. The first couple of clear nights in a while....and they fall under a 'blue' (second full moon in the month) , 'super' (closest to the Earth in its orbit) moon. So, I was only able to do shortish exposures (M81 etc and Horsehead were 60s, M78 and Hyades were 120 s).

M81, M82 and NGC3077

Part of the Hyades in Taurus

M78 in Orion, a reflection nebula

Horsehead and Flame nebulae in Orion