A couple of shots from my very early imaging days - March 2006! Not so good but you have to start somewhere.

I've never had a very good view to the South due to a rather large Silver Birch in my garden and quite bad light pollution from Weymouth, 2 miles away. Well, I recently got the tree 'lowered' a bit, quite a lot actually but there's nothing I can do about the light pollution. So, as it looked like a rare clear night, I went out about 11pm for an extended session viewing some objects I've never been able to get at high in the sky before because of the tree. M65 and M66 in Leo were my targets, M65, a mag. 9.5 edge on Sa spiral size 10' x 3' and M66, a mag 8.9 almost face-on Sb barred spiral size 9' x 4.5'.

It was pretty cold and it got colder as the night went on. M65 I managed to capture quite well with 30 x 60 sec exposures on my MX5C ccd camera through my OO DX250 Newtonian. I'd recently got some good advice on how to prevent dewing which I tried out. At the beginning of the session I gently grasped the secondary holder for about 2 minutes - this would prevent dew forming for the entire night, hopefully. After I had enough images of M65 I moved onto M66 and repeated the imaging sequence. As I am in my 'control centre', (garden shed!) operating the camera and telescope remotely I rarely look at the telescope once it's running, particularly when it's -5C outside. However, I began to notice a fading signal after a few exposures of M66 and put it down to increasing cloud cover. Finally at about 2-15am I decided to call it a day after 10 or so 60 sec exposures and went to cover up the equipment for the night. The entire telescope was coated with a thick layer of rime and the main mirror was completely dewed over. But the secondary was fine! So the advice I was given had worked brilliantly. Problem is how to keep the primary warm. Any ideas anyone?

Anyway I got something out of the night and here are the images. Amazingly M66 looks remarkably sharp considering the layer of dew the light was passing through and the limited number of exposures, though the colour's gone a bit odd.