After a long pack and trek by camel–our small herd was quite hesitant about swimming across the Mississippi– we arrived at our new home high in the Morris Hills area Northeast of Rochester, Minnesota.

We are a tad north of our previous homestead in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, but the difference is minuscule: 44.065 degrees North here compared with 43.997 North there. But we are higher here at 1,124 feet above sea level compared to our former living space on the shores of Lake Winnebago, Wisconsin.

When we first laid claim to this land on April 16 of this year, Venus was shining bright (as it always is) in the Western gloaming. Venus is still there, but it is higher in the sky at sunset than it was almost three months ago.

During our long transit, I lost an importance piece of my mount. I’m sure it is here somewhere, but at our rate of unpacking, it may be 2029 before I find it. I ordered a new mount from ZWO and tried it out Saturday night between 10-11 p.m. local daylight savings time.

Happy to say it worked flawlessly. I had not forgotten how to align my telescope to track equatorially using SeeStar software. The only fly in the soup was a neighbor who left three floodlights on in his backyard when I was outside. They are forgiven.

Speaking of flies, I was pleasantly surprised to see perhaps a dozen fireflies floating about in the July night, looking for love. We are most happy to know that they live in the forest that dominates the western part of our sprawling .6 acre homestead. It’s been years since I’ve seen that many.

I took pictures of M51, the famous Whirlpool galaxy, a circumpolar showcase object that dominates the dreary architecture of Canes Venaceti, the old globular cluster M3 excepted.

I was out on our deck for about 50 minutes while the SeeStar snapped and stacked 75, 20-second exposures. It did a nice job, considering the atmosphere has been wet and turbulent around these parts for the last two weeks or so.

Charles Messier catalogued the 51st object of his famous list in 1773, describing it as a “very faint nebula, without stars.”

At 8.39 magnitude, optical assistance is needed to see M51. The 23 million light years-distant star cloud continues to play gravitational games with NGC 5195. Astronomers believe the smaller, irregularly shaped NGC 5195 has been circling around M51 for millions of years, using its limited gravitational forces to swipe mass from the larger galaxy, like a shark ripping chunks from a giant whale, then retreating to circle around it and to wait for it to bleed out and die.

NGC 5195 is in for a long wait.

The weird little galaxy does contain a pair of black holes, some of the most active ones we’ve “seen” using the Chandra X-ray Observatory circling earth.

I scrubbed the image a little with Pixinsight and Photoscape X . During that process, I was intrigued by a smudgy little cloud in the lower right part of the image. By Jove, that too is a galaxy. Known as IC 4263, it is a regularly shaped spiral galaxy that glows at magnitude 14.5. The SeeStar S50 continues to amaze me at what the tiny two-inch triplet objective can find.

Thank you very much for reading. Share with your friends (or enemies if you want to launch torment) and we’ll see you next time.