A night filled with setbacks and mistakes. However, it ended with success. The first moonless night since the beginning of the month. I misjudged my first attempt at M81 / M82 and ended up with a tree between me and my targets. I moved my setup, polar aligned and calibrated RA again. This time the target was so high that attempting to get to 9h 55m caused my Dec adjustment knob to press against the tripod and my diagonal was stuck between two tripod legs. So I decided to simply ignore the RA / Dec settings and 'slew' to where I thought the targets were. After 5 minutes of panning, I found both targets.
Very visible and easy to see. M81 was larger, more oval and more dim. M82 was probably the brightest galaxy I've seen so far. Very narrow, like the streak of pencil. A hard night, but a success!
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