From:    Dave Valko
Date:    Mar 31, 2026, 3:34 AM
Subject: Messier Marathon Report(s) -- here 2026

Even though the recent weather forecasts haven't been favorable for a Messier 
Marathon, I decided to try a non-visual one this year.  I bought a 
ZWO Seestar S50 smart telescope last year and thought it would be something 
different to try a marathon imaging all 110 Messier objects.  Fortunately we 
did get some clear sky this past Saturday night.  I didn't check the 
satellite loop but I knew clouds would interfere at some point.  And they 
did.  I managed to image 87 objects by about 3 AM when the sky turned 
completely cloudy.

A few things about this years report...  Although the location is Gallitzin 
State Forest, my site is actually on an old reclaimed surface mine (1000's of 
acre's) quite open except for scrub grasses.  It's also my main dark sky site, 
only a few miles from my home.  When I started out in the hobby, our area had 
a solid Bortle 3 rural sky.  But light pollution has become a serious problem 
with light domes in 4 area's around the horizon.  I have the Dark Sky Meter 
app on my iphone but it never occurred to me to use it to check the quality 
of the sky by the numbers.  I used UTC time and date.  By the time I could 
start the marathon in twilight, the UTC date had changed to 29 March, however 
it was still 28 March locally.  My sequence deviated from yours and Don 
Machholz at the beginning and end.  M74 is the object closest to the horizon 
followed by M77 (1d higher).  Likewise, the M31 group is slight lower than 
M33.  At one point M29 and M39 in Cygnus were still too low, so I moved to 
southern objects deviating from the sequence again.  I also deviated when 
the clouds arrived.  I didn't bother writing anything in the Comments column.  
I had already made comments on all the objects from the 2021 marathon, and I 
had images of all the objects this year.

Dave Valko
Dunlo, PA U.S.A.