I took the Baby Brandon 63 mm f/5.6 refractor, that I reviewed here a few days ago, to Fremont Peak State Park, near Salinas, California, on the night of 13-14 April, 1996. There was no fog in the valleys or on the coastal plain, so things weren't terribly dark, but it was warm enough that I was comfortable with a light jacket on, and there was no dew that I noticed.

Comet Hyakutake is indeed hanging in there -- between the last full moon, a run of bad weather in the Bay Area, and assorted early-evening commitments, I hadn't made any observation worth reporting for quite a while. But there it was, prominent at a glance in the twilight to the northwest, showing at least a ten-degree naked-eye tail. At 18 diameters the Brandon showed a coma more concentrated toward the center, and of higher surface brightness, than I remembered from observations in late March. Because of excessive light, I did not attempt a magnitude estimate.

For me, the first order of business with any new astronomical instrument is a Messier hunt. I have been through the Messier catalog twelve times before; the Brandon is the thirteenth try. With a 20 mm Erfle eyepiece, I had a field nearly four degrees wide. The light tripod of adjustable height made observing a cinch -- it was almost as easy to tick off Messier objects as with my 10x70 binocular (which is the easiest so far).

I got there too late to spot M79 in Lepus, and was too tired to wait for the summer Milky Way to rise, but in a two-hour interval I went though more than half the Messier catalog, everything else from the Pleiades east through M5, plus M13 and M92. At eighteen diameters magnification, all were easy to identify: The Brandon is about as much telescope as Messier used for most of his observations. Highlights included NGC 5195 -- the companion to M51 -- and a hint of structure in the Owl Nebula.

Around eleven PM I put in a 6 mm eyepiece for a look at epsilon Lyra, peeping through tree branches. Both components showed hints of asymmetry, but with the object so low, the seeing was too poor to permit saying for sure whether it was resolved. (Of course, as I previously reported, I had already split Polaris, Castor, gamma Virginis and gamma Leonis, all at 88 diameters, so there was no doubt that the instrument gave at least reasonable performance on fine detail.)

The Baby Brandon seems well suited for the kind of quick-look astronomy that I bought it for. Setup took only about one minute, and it was neat to be able to pick up the instrument with one hand and move it sideways to peer around a misplaced tree.