Night - Fifty - Gibbous Moon

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Night Fortythree - The Whirlpool Galaxy

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First night out in a long while between health and weather. Returned to M 51, The Whirlpool Galaxy. Wikipedia says - What later became known as the Whirlpool Galaxy was discovered on October 13, 1773, by Charles Messier while hunting for objects that could confuse comet hunters, and was designated in Messier's catalogue as M51.[13] William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, employing a 72-inch (1.8 m) reflecting telescope at Birr Castle, Ireland, found that the Whirlpool possessed a spiral structure, the first "nebula" to be known to have one.[14] These "spiral nebulae" were not recognized as galaxies until Edwin Hubble was able to observe Cepheid variables in some of these spiral nebulae, which provided evidence that they were so far away that they must be entirely separate galaxies.[15] The advent of radio astronomy and subsequent radio images of M51 unequivocally demonstrated that the Whirlpool and its companion galaxy are indeed interacting.
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Night - Fortynine - Return to the scene of the crime Comet PanSTARRS

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Comet Pan STARRS 2025 R3   This is a repeat of the previous morning's work. Basically to see if the telescope was still functioning as I hoped. All went well at a little after 4 AM. The telescope has a ding or two where it hit the gravel but all is functioning well. I thought the threads on the tripod shoe might have been plastic but they are definitely metal. So the failure was just in setting down the tripod too hard without giving the telescope any support and the scope simply ripped itself off the threads and fell to the ground. In the future, all movement of the tripod will happen with support for the telescope.   The first imaging still caught some trees as the comet was remaining a bit low on the horizon. But the second capture gave me this image (and a cropped version) which was clean without too many satellites criss crossing the image.   .
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Night - fifty eight - The Bow TIe Nebula

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Here is first image off of the Dwarf 3 from last night's imaging of the Bow Tie Nebula. The target is exceptionally tiny in the center of this field. Here is the cropped image of this nebula. This nebula formed when an evolved star entered its white dwarf phase of evolution and expelled its outer layers. As the star’s gaseous outer envelope moves away from the star, it is heated by the ultraviolet radiation from the stellar remnant to temperatures of about 10,000 degrees Celsius. As a result, the shell of ejected material becomes visible and glows as a planetary nebula. The Bow-Tie Nebula has the shape of a barrel, with two pairs of lobes near the poles. The lobes were created by additional ejections of material from the central star. The barrel-like main cavity is surrounded by a set of concentric rings visible in the optical and infrared bands. Ths Dwarf 3 scope is excellent but objects of this size fail to provide a great deal of reward. Just too small to say that ...
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