Wocial-Martin 1

Yep. First time—thanks to the generous and eagle-eyed Thomas Wocial (@Thomas W). He noticed a tiny formation in a wide-field image of M25 I posted to Astrobin back in July 2025. He contacted me to let me know there might be something new there. Here’s a close crop depicting what Thomas saw in that image:

Thomas did the work to hunt down the progenitor star while I busied myself about reprocessing the image. It turns out that the area where the object appears is in another frame shot with the same scope, so I was able to double in integration time by stacking the overlap between the two images for a potential submission.

The star Thomas found was a hot star of magnitude 18.14 partially obscured by a magnitude 15.21 field star:

There’s a very faint presence of the nebula in Ha, but not enough to contribute much to imaging:

The O3 presence is also very faint. Here is a continuum-subtracted bin4 image that expresses just how faint it is:

Further processing brings out the O3 more, displaying a morphology that comports with what the authorities expect:

As for the image you see above, after we sent off the submission, I turned my CDK on the target in hopes of getting a much more detailed image. Unfortunately, the summer monsoon in New Mexico did not cooperate, so I was only able to get 20 hours each of Ha and O3. I thought about waiting to post this until next year, when I plan to get much more time on it—but then I thought of the little story from the end of The Mote in God’s Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle:

A thief was on trial before the Sultan and sentenced to death. He asked the Sultan to spare his life.

“You don’t know it, but I am the greatest teacher in your land. If you spare my life, I promise to teach your horse to sing hymns.”

The Sultan smirked but accepted the offer. “You have a year, and if the horse cannot sing, you will be killed.”

Daily, after that, the thief spent his time singing hymns to the horse. His friends laughed as they saw him and asked what he hoped to accomplish.

“Many things can happen in a year,” the thief told them. “The Sultan may die, the horse may die, I may even die. Or, maybe the horse will learn how to sing.”

I’m not sure the horse will learn to sing, but all the other things sure are possibilities!

I’m not steeped in finding or submitting new discoveries, so I really appreciate Thomas tracking this down as well all the help that Dana Patchick and Dan Stern supplied along the way.