Today some of the profs in the department tackled our storeroom's clutter problem. One large cartload of electronics junk took about 15 minutes to load. Most of it was stuff had been donated by G.E. before they closed their local facility. We discovered some treasures, but mostly I'm just interested in recovering the space.

Tonight at the observatory we were shooting through clouds the whole time. First, I think I messed up the sidereal time clock, because when I pointed the scope at Saturn, we were off in RA by an hour. I'll check that out when I go to fix the light on the RA scale. Before the clouds completely shut us down, I tried to hunt down M81. We took a photo and saw:



which is actually M82. But, M81 is close by, so we got a photo of it as well:



We didn't have time to take an exposure longer than 45 seconds before the clouds rolled in. Also, I'm not sure how to properly take flat field images. Hopefully when I get that figured out, the image quality will improve.