ASTRO: M65 and M66 Galaxies

Last night was one of those nights where you just gotta go for it: we had
some unforecast clear skies last night between monsoons of near-biblical
proportion. We get hit again tomorrow :-(

This time of year we can get rain and clouds for two to three weeks without
any relief, so when I saw an opening last night I scrambled to get some time
logged.

I picked M65 and M66 because with the FOV I get with my ST10XME and my
AP155EDF, it frames them both nicely.

This is the first time I have shot any galaxies in a eon it seems. I
actually put away the emission line filters and used my other filter wheel
with the LRGB set (what's that dad?).

After the rain we've had lately, I expected good transparency. Turns out to
have been pretty dark, clear and the seeing was better than I expected
looking at the jetstream map.

I managed to log 5 exposures of 20 minutes each through my lum filter before
the wispy stuff rolled through again.

I decided to shoot a few darks and see what happened a bit later. When it
cleared about an hour or so later, I decided to tear down, it was getting
late and I was tired.

So here is 100 minutes worth of luminance

http://www.rdcrisp.darkhorizons.org/m65_m66_page.htm