Updated and revised June 2022 (galaxy NGC 5474) Observer’s Challenge Report, Final.  One of the fainter deep-sky objects to-date, in the past 14 years!  

The report will be heading into the fall really soon, and hopefully much better weather for most of us.  As for me, I prefer those cold nights of winter, with heavy coats, neck warmers, gloves, and for those of us in the south…always wearing a toboggan.  

Note:  From lower Virginia, and further south, all the way to Texas, a toboggan is a hat to keep a head warm…”known as a knitted or ski hat” in the north.  We had a good discussion concerning this, about ten years ago, and most everyone learned something new.

Yes…something to keep southerners heads warm, and not a sled.  🙂

My observing season really begins when the Pleiades is coming up in the east, just cresting the treetops.  This was my first deep-sky object at about 11 years old (same for Leslie Peltier) and at the time, I didn’t know it was Messier 45.  

Throughout my earliest years as an amateur astronomer, I always waited anxiously for October, and seeing M45 rising above the trees, and the same goes even today.  

Seeing M45 for the first time in the fall, causes me to go back in time.  I become eleven years old again…what a great feeling! 

Roger Ivester