"Like No Place Else on Earth"

Wednesday, 19 Mar 2025 at White Sands National Park.
From NPS site: "Like No Place Else on Earth"

We met some family friends from Texas that we had wanted to meet with for the past 2 years. Their daughter and our daughter were instant friends! 🥰 We all had an awesome time.
*Feeling blessed*

A small, rarely imaged galaxy...

This is NGC 5474 --- a "peculiar" dwarf companion galaxy to M101.
It is ~21 Million light years away.

Not very exciting, but it is rarely imaged and not easily recognized. Very small target, but I pointed the "big RC" at it and this was the result.

Home gym upgrades...

Side bar topic: Latest HOME GYM upgrades!

Super happy ... and recovery mode after so many surgeries in 2024 (2 of them were major surgery - overnight in hospital and tons of stitches - and that's all I'll say about that).

SUN... (11 Jan 2025)

Yesterday (Saturday, 11 Jan 2025), I took out the solar scope since it is a much easier setup and it was nice out.

Here are three views of the sun from today (Saturday) here in Las Cruces (from my front patio). I added a GSO focal reducer since my first effort (last time I posted sun stuff) so I was able to get the entire disk.

Some weirdness in technical stuff I won't go into, but it was just a mediocre capture.