A first run at NGC2174 a.k.a. the Monkey Head Nebula:
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I wish the weather was playing along. Rain and overcast so far. Hopefully it clears up some in the next weeks
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The good thing is that the comet will be visible for awhile.
I had another crack at it last night.
Also with the SeeStar.
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Made perfect sense. A whole generation of student pilots missed out on your eruditity* and profundity. <== Thatâs actually how I talk. So MY students on the other hand had a tough time of it.
*not a word
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Last nightâs capture. The Cave Nebula (Sh 2-155).
This is 5 hours worth of exposure. It needs at least another 5 hours I think.
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7.5 would be just perfect! 
looks great!
From last night (actually the early hours of this morning)âŚ
IC 443 a.k.a. The Jellyfish Nebula found in the constellation Gemini. This is a Super-Nova remnant, whatâs left after a star cooked off some 30,000 years ago.
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I looked it up and that is 5,000 lightyears away. These images keep reminding me of how unimaginably vast the (observable) universe is.
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Or, how depressingly insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things⌠
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True. Ultimately, on a cosmic scale, my existence less than a rounding error.
But I still marvel at the advances in technology and manufacturing I have seen in my lifetime. I can remember when the ability to take all these wonderful images that you have was once the sole provence of Government, or extremely well funded research institutes.
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Fun fact: I noticed that my phone shot from a few weeks ago doesnât only contain the Andromeda Galaxy, but also the Triangulum Galaxy (M33).
@PaulRix have you tried that one yet?
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This is it btw.:
You have to zoom in and it is just a smidge, but I am shocked that it is even there.
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That sounds like the âtotal perspective vortexâ from the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy ⌠which basically shows a size accurate map of the universe and a small arrow saying you are here 
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Iâve been wonderingâŚ
About the flat, heliocentric worldview of the ancients. I donât believe it. At least I think it was far from universal. I look at the night sky a few hours each month. My ancestors, well some of them, bored and curious and lacking an Insta feed, probably gazed at the sky a few hours each week. They saw the same celestial objects move east to west each night. The two big objects, the sun and the moon, were round. Thatâs curious. If the ancient observer wasnât on the equator, the constellations he observed moved not just east to west but also rotated roughly on some arbitrary axis far to the north (or south). Our ancestors had access to orb shapes and could easily see how the curve of light and shadows played on those shapes. Monthly they would observe those same features at work on the Moon, often with the dark portion clearly also visible. If that circle in the sky is playing with light exactly like this orange in my hand, it must be an orb.
Now I know that it is impossible for my modern brain to unknow what it knows. That the truths I have been taught are only obvious because education and repetition have made them so. Yet these truths are just so easily observable. And the counterfactuals, such as that the Earth is flat and stars are nothing more than little open viewports into heaven, are just so complicated. I donât deny that MOST people believed them. But I will always believe that thousands of years before Copernicus, curious men and women with decent eyesight could see the obvious, that their home was a spinning round thing and that Godâs hand, or some other unfathomable force, kept their feet planted to it.
Our pre-historic ancestors were a smart, curious lot. Nothing meaningful separates us from them genetically. The same passion that has @PaulRix out at night motivated them to do the same with the only tools they could avail, their eyes. They had our brains and our inquisitive nature. Long before Greece or Egypt, and many thousands of years before Galileo, some of them got it. Convince me Iâm wrong!
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People in ancient Greece knew that the Earth was a sphere.
There was even a guy that measured its circumference, some 200 years B.C.E.
Edit:
Clicked send too early. What I wanted to add: it indeed isnât hard to believe that people several thousand years earlier came up with the same idea.
Especially those that had a good horizon visible and ships available (living at the sea).
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The story of Eratosthenes as told by the late, great Carl Sagan :
@Aginor I havenât tried M33 in a very long time. All my equipment had a field of view that was too narrow to take in the entire galaxy, until now that is. If I get a chance next week I will have a crack at it.
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I think today our biggest problem is that some people are willfully ignorant (which is unforgivable IMHO). On top of that we have the internet that gives them a platform that was never there before. There are also a lot of very gullible people who get sucked into outlandish conspiracy theories or throw all logic to the wind and mindlessly follow religious dogma. In some ways we have come a long way, but in others we seem to have our feet still firmly planted in the Dark Ages.
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My point isnât about modern flat earthers. Those people will always exist. My personal theory about such people is that human society needs them. Their willful ignorance (love that term!) is a feature of societal evolution to keep the rest of us grounded in factual, observable reality. By perceiving them this way, I donât dislike them so much.
My point rather was about âflat earthersâ 6000 years ago. I believe (without evidence) that even then there were skywatchers who got the basics right.
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I think physically and mentally we are not all that much different than we were back then. Our view of the world today is only possible because of the observations and discoveries of many previous generations. In turn, what we consider cutting edge today is little more than a building block that will contribute to what will follow in the future and be considered as normal to future generations.
One of the things that amazes me about the intelligence of the finest minds back before we had computers and electronics is Celestial navigation. The fact that they worked out all that was needed, and then calculated star positions for every second of every hour of every day for several years ahead, tabulated all that data in almanacs and also constructed mechanical clocks of such precision that they kept accurate time along with instruments such as the sextant⌠all to allow accurate navigation across the worldâs oceans. Itâs mind boggling to me how they achieved that in the 1700âs. But even that was an evolution from previous navigation methods. Now I can get an accurate Lat/Long position from my phone. 
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