Messier Marathon Part 5 (On to Sunrise)

By this point, only one other person was left and he was packing up. Soon, I was all alone, waiting for the last few objects to rise.

M6 is an open cluster in Scorpius:

And M7 is another open cluster next to it. This was shot through trees.

M16, the Eagle Nebula follows. I didn’t get much of the nebula here, but I did get the cluster:

Then M17, the Swan Nebula:

And M18, an open cluster nearby:

M24 is a gigantic star cloud in Sagittarius. It’s not much to look at here, but it’s mainly just clumps of the Milky Way:

Then M25:

And M23:

The next three objects are close-by. M8, the Lagoon Nebula, M20, the Trifid Nebula and M21, an open cluster. The latter two are obvious. I barely caught part of M8 in this picture (lower right).

Then M28:

M22, an amazing globular cluster:

M69

and M70:

At this point the noise is getting very bad. M54 is next:

M55 should be next, but I was unable to capture this due to it being very low. M75 was the next one I got:

Then we hit the last two “easy-to-find” objects of the night. M15:

and M2:

Then comes M72, a glob in Aquarius. This is very hard to see visually. It’s right in the middle.

The last one I got was M73, an asterism of four stars in Aquarius (right in the middle).

And that was that. M30 is not really possible from this latitude, and especially not facing into the Baltimore skyglow.

I left around 6:30 and got to see a gorgeous thumbnail moonrise (no pics, sorry). As exhausting as this was, I was very pleased with the experience.