The first Spring day 2023 brought the fist clear night to the Pacific Northwest, therefore the chosen title.  Seeing was average and below and this season is anyways not my beloved one. There are not many Galaxies up in the sky big enough for my new RedCat51. Nevertheless, to not get even more rusty and forget every single step possible, I placed my mount out on the balcony waiting for darkness to arrive. Imaging tiny galaxies in a Bortle 9 area is fun. My RedCat51 also desperately needed it's First Light. The night stayed cloudless and the setup was greeted by the sun the next morning...
Subs processed under cloudy rainy skies (again) in PixInsight using the 3 XTerminators and GHS for the stretch. 

The Whirlpool Galaxy M51, comprising of two interacting galaxies NGC 5194 (M51a) and NGC 5195 (M51b) lies in the constellation Canes Venatici at approximately 31 million LY from Earth.
M51 was discovered on October 13, 1773 by Charles Messier and it is the first galaxy that later on, was classified as a Spiral Galaxy. It's smaller companion M51b was discovered in 1781 by Pierre Méchain, although it was at that time not clear if this was a separate structure or an interacting one. In 1845, William Parsons, employing a 72-inch (1.8 m) reflecting telescope, found that the Whirlpool possessed a spiral structure, the first "nebula" to be known to have one. These "spiral nebulae" were not recognized as galaxies until Edwin Hubble's studies.