My First Dabble with the Messier Marathon

I didn't do it years ago when I should have, and now I realize I can't manage the atlases, finderscopes and eyepieces with my 67 year-old eyeballs.

A fellow astronomer who is omnipresent and omnipotent on all things amateur astronomy was organizing the 2025 Messier Marathon, and for the first time ever it bit me. I started observing in an astronomy club in the mid-80s with serious droughts due to work and travel, and through it all I had acquired certain disciplines and experiences that stick with me to this day. But the Messier Marathon was not one of them. Up until last night.

Last night was a Thursday, and my buddy's marathon was slated for Friday night. I had already gone through the self-inflicted paranoia about whether to bring a Goto scope or my old, classic 8" LX-3 with a motor drive but absolutely no brains of any kind. It's essentially a dobsonian on an equatorial wedge mount with only enough sense to keep pushing the RA axis at about 15"/second. Nothing more. Except it has an exceptional 8x50 right-angle, illuminated, polar reticle finderscope. In my opinion, a unique and able gem in this world of useless 3x20 nothing scopes. And as far as my experience has taught me, there is nothing as precious as a usable finderscope.

Knowing that Friday night would be (in my mind) a show-up-and-don't-blow-up night for me, I decided to head to my observatory and crank out the first half of a Messier Marathon using my ASIAIR for slewing to targets, but using my binoculars, finderscope, and a vintage Wil Tirion 2000.0 bound atlas to refamiliarize myself with each object and its likely take-off points for some good, old-fashioned star hopping. Like we did in 1984.

About three objects in, and I was resigned to the fact that I just cannot handle starhopping to faint smudges that are themselves at the end of a long line of faint stars. To look up, I need my glasses. To look through my binoculars, they must come off. To look through my finderscope, they must go back on. To check against the atlas, they must come off. Same for the iPad view from my plate solve in the piggybacked 430mm refractor. And for the eyepiece itself. Checking myself against the night sky at any point required glasses back on. It was ridiculous back and forth of fog breath, smacking lenses, and looking through the wrong instrument with the wrong prep in front of my eyeballs.

Finally, I settled into a different routine. I would select the next object and find it on my atlas, and on my iPad in ASIAIR in the Atlas view. Then I would drag the FOV box over to the object and let the telescope slew while I looked up at the constellations to appreciate the target's location in relation to prominent asterisms. Finally, I would revert to the eyepiece, a 21mm Ethos looking through a 14" ACF at f/8.

In this way, I managed to enjoy every single Messier object that I targeted, and to see how it looks to the unaided eye, as opposed to the Live Stacking views that I have become so dependent upon for the last two-plus years. Seeing about 40 objects in the space of three hours brought me back to the early days of observing. It was not a true Messier Marathon by anyone's definition, and despite the technical assistance in landing the objects inside my 42 arc-minute field of view time after time, there was absolutely no compromise when it came to that feeling of picking out a remote, far-away deep space object through the privacy and worldliness of a telescope that was subject to my beckon call.

And so, to the purists and the technology adopters alike I say do a marathon with the goto, unabashed and unashamed, and focus (!) on the real goal: to see, and soak, and enjoy, and ponder all those distant places so far out there that mankind has barely stumbled out its own front door towards, let alone crossing the street or journeying to the next town or village.

It is out there, and it needs to be seen. Do it!