Some friends and I saw the lunar eclipse this evening from 4000 ft above the SF Bay area near the summit of Mt. Hamilton (the site of Lick Observatory, though we were not on the Obs. grounds).

I took my trusty 12" LX200 and my Celestron 8x56 binoculars. Nice eclipse. I would judge (and my experience is very limited) that the atmosphere was pretty clear in general as the Moon never really got very dark. But it did have a beautiful orange/pink color with different shades across the face of the Moon. And nearby Saturn was a treat.

All this looked really fine in my 8x binocs but in the LX200 at 88x (35mm Panoptic, my longest eyepiece) it was either too bright (during the partial phase) or too dim (during totality) and never could I see Saturn in the same field. 8x gave a much better view than 88x. [Actually, it was not the aperture that was a problem per se but rather the magnification. But with a 300mm aperture you can't get much below 50x and still fit the light into my eye.]