Ekland's J and a new alignment technique

I headed out about 8:00 tonight to try the ETX in my backyard observatory. There seems to be a new ultra bright streetlight on that side that I didn't notice last spring so it's kind of bright back there now but I was still able to see all 5 stars of the Cassiopeia "W" with averted vision and was able to make out Polaris so that's not all bad. I decided to try finding Polaris with the ETX in an attempt to get a better north orientation. I set the OTA to my latitude angle (26 degrees) and then just slewed the scope in azimuth until I saw a relatively bright star. Then I leveled the tube with my level and started a two star alignment. It headed to Vega as before and like last night I had to go hunting for it. I used the spiral search this time and found Vega but it took awhile. Turns out my 'north star' wasn't really polaris at all. It then took off to Altair and even that wasn't in the FOV. I found Altair and synced Autostar and then told it to find Polaris. Bingo, right on the money but it was quite a bit east of where I thought it was. I had the altitude right and noted that it was 63.5 degrees on my declination scale. That makes sense because after all, it IS a dec scale! My 26 plus 63.5 makes 89.5 and that's awfully close to 90.
Next I went after M29 and Ekland's J mentioned in the Nov issue of S&T. Ekland's J looks like a J alright. I counted 11 'stars' but it turns out one was CR419 and another was NGC6910.
Next I tried M52 and NGC7289 in Cassiopeia. There was a faint fuzzy but nothing in particular. I found Eta Cas but wasn't quite able to split it. Perhaps with a higher power EP.
M15 and M2 were both visible but faint globulars. M2 was just like CdC shows it and from the star field I saw, it looks like my 26mm plossl ep gives about a 4 degree FOV. M15 looked about the same.
All in all it was a pretty good night until the smoke from someone's (Reynosa?) burning garbage made it too smokey outside. The shopmate still makes a pretty good stand although some angles work better than others. The $1.50 Walmart desklamp with a 4w reddish bulb makes a pretty good red light but needs to be redder. It makes a good reading light and beats a flashlight hands down.