My FitBit “AI Coach” is giving me grief this morning because when my three-day fever broke at 2 am, I wasn’t able to fall back asleep. I am glad I stayed awake because I have a mystery on my hands.

I quietly wandered the house, then stepped outside to breathe the cool air. My sight is so wracked with double vision that in my muzzied brain, I thought there was an eclipse squaring off the point of the third quarter moon. That’s an impossible thing, so I went inside for my glasses and phone. I would capture a pretty night shot.

And I did. Night Sight mode on the Pixel 9 takes decent photos, as long as I am careful not to wobble. The third quarter moon glows like it’s full; Saturn sits just to the right. You can make out the Great Square of Pegasus. And there is a weird greenish splodge. What is that? A galaxy? A comet?

I have Heavens Above on my phone to track the satellites we frequently see but it’s a limited sky chart. So I asked Claude how I could identify the object in my photo. He gave me a list of possibilities and some resources.

And that was where the rabbit hole started. Comet 220P/McNaught is visible in tonight’s sky in just that direction. Surely that’s it?

It’s not. 220P/McNaught would have been visible below the moon, not above it. Can we see it in the photo? Maybe… If you look closely, there’s a light blur in the right location.

So not what I thought. NASA noted that this month 10P/Tempel would be visible, but it’s not in this sector of the sky.

Maybe a deep sky object? A galaxy? Claude suggested M74, the “Phantom Galaxy” but if you look at the SkyLive chart above, you will see that M74 is in the glare of the moon. Certainly not visible.

And then I tried Astrometry.net to “plate solve” my photo to the known sky. This is real science. It was confusing! I learned about .FIT files. One of its modes shows green and red circles – green circles are the stars in the known catalog and red are points of light detected in your photo. They might be stars. Or maybe artifacts from Night Sight mode. My photo showed a lot of uncataloged stars circled in red, including the mystery.

I ran out for another photo at 3:45, just before dawn made the sky too bright.

Night Sight turned the dark sky a vivid blue. Fewer stars show, though Astrometry says there 982 visible. I can see the moon, Saturn and the Great Square. And the mystery is still present.

So what is it?? The mystery doesn’t appear in any star charts. It doesn’t align with any known comets. It’s too persistent to be a satellite. I suppose it must be a scratch on my lens. Quite prosaic rather than dramatic. (Though it could be ALIENS; I didn’t rule them out.)

And that’s this morning’s deep dive into the night sky. It was fun, I learned some things, and I am happy that my fever hasn’t returned. Now that it’s 8 am and I need a coffee or a nap.