I began my adventure today setting up around 3pm in winds of 20-30mph and temps in the mid teens.  All I can say is it was brutal, but I continued anyways, not wanting to miss an opportunity to try out the new gear.  I took a few pictures in the process of setting up for the night.  I did end up using the Canon Xsi on the Edge 800HD ota for imaging and my DSI IIIC for guiding with PHD.  I ran into a few snags early on including not being able to find the ac power adapter for my Canon, so I ended up running on batteries.      

Setting up the gear to image in very cold and windy weather

 The setup of the gear went fairly fast considering the cold and windy weather.  I was waiting for stars to show themselves around 6pm so I could get my initial alignment in.   The first big snag came as the wind was blowing in hard from the West.  I had just completed using my polar scope to quick align scope mount and began my 2 star alignment.  The polar scope alignment was quick and simple.  The star alignment though was very obviously running into some serious errors.  I tried three times to get it going, but it was way off on alignment stars.  I then remembered that I had set the OTA orientation within the hand control to favor East 90.  This was done because I had read somewhere that with the side by side setup this was setting to choose because the saddle is turned by 90 degrees at initial startup.  I quickly went through menu and changed ota orientation back to normal.  The mount does not care where your starting point is alignment marks etc, it knows the starting point and that is all that matters!  At this point the wind was full force and my hands had grown numb, so I headed inside to warm up with some coffee.       

Both scopes with Bahtinov Masks attached as I was setting up

After warming up I came back out to tackle the alignment, confident I had fixed the problem.  This was my first time using the side by side setup outdoors.  I proceeded to align the scope without any further issues.  The gotos were nailing the alignment stars dead on and I was happy.  I placed the scope up onto Sirius and hooked up my Canon Xsi to the Edge 800 HD Ota.  I then placed the Bahtinov Mask onto the end of the optical tube.  I had the Canon EOS utility open,  after some help via messenger from Ray Shore, I found where to change the bulb setting, and proceeded to focus the scope.  It took only two ten second exposures(these could be reduced in exposure time) to obtain focus with the mask; the whole process may have taken about 1 minute. 

The next step was to get PHD started and to focus my DSI IIIC on my Meade 80mm ED 5000 APO.  PHD has a live view window which allowed me to place the mask on the OTA and achieve focus in less than 20 seconds!  I could  not live without the mask which my friend Alex strongly swore by when I was setup as his observatory this past October.       

Quick test of PHD using Sirius as the Image and a nearby star to guide. I had never guided before this night.

Looking to the North during intial setup the cameras were later changed

The time was now 745 pm,  I was frozen but  the winds were beginning to die down somewhat.   I realized  I did not have the ac adapter for the Canon(Ray was at other end of messenger relating to equipment snafus!), I decided to continue on, using the two batteries I had for the camera.  I  took another break to let the wind die down and came back out to do a test of PHD, using Sirius as my main image(above overexposed).  I found a guide star and ran a few tests.  I experimented with PHD a bit, then decided it was time to try my hand at M42 before it was out of view behind a tree.  I hit goto on M42 and the scope swung around and nailed the target.  I looked at my live display  realizing  my guidescope was looking directly into the top branches of the tree nearby.  M42 was a no go.  I was disappointed but decided to take a look at Starry Night to see what objects were nearby.  I settled on moving over to M66.  I was cold, at this point having a hard time thinking or even moving my fingers, looking back, now that I am rested and warm ,I should have centered both galaxies(DUH).  It is amazing what cold weather can do to the brain.  The brain shuts all rationale thoughts down to concentrate on keeping the body warm.     

I found an alignment star fairly easily and decided to do a quick 1 minute exposure to see what was in the FOV.  I could see two galaxies, not a perfectly framed picture but the cold was setting in, I was game (My Brain was Elsewhere).  I set the Canon on up in the EOS utility to capture 8 images, iso 800; at 5 min exposures each, hit start then walked inside to warm up again.  I have not had time yet to go through all of the images, but I did manage to whip a quick image together.  I am still new to processing, this is a very crude picture.  Not the best framing, but something to show at this point.  You can see the field is flat for the new Edge 800HD OTA.     

My first quick process of M66

It is getting very late past 4am,  I still have to break the gear down for the night.  I will post some more updates after getting gear in and some sleep accomplished.  Some minor updates posted later on.  

Cropped M66

       

Messing around with NEAT