Over the last few evenings I have continued my Messier survey with the Orion UltraView 10x50 binocular I bought recently. Early in the evening of Tuesday 8 October, I was on the beach at Moss Landing, California, about half way down the shore of Monterey Bay from Santa Cruz to Monterey. The weather was clear -- the day had been a scorcher -- and the sky to the west, out over the Pacific, was quite dark, so I decided to look for some faint objects about to retire into the sunset glow. I had logged M4 and M80 two nights previously, and M10 and M12 were bright enough that I could detect them from Palo Alto, but M14 had eluded me from suburbia, so I chased it down. Nearby Comet Hale-Bopp was of course far brighter, and the huge open cluster, IC 4665, was eye-catching as I swept through northern Ophiuchus.

M62 was too low to try for, and though I identified the field of M107, I could not detect it -- these will likely have to wait for next spring. But I found M9 and M19, the latter only glimpsed occasionally with averted vision. It's brighter when higher up.

I reviewed some objects I had looked at a night or two ago -- M54, M69 and M70 were right where I had left them :-), and a little more prominent in darker sky. I was puzzled at not being able to find M27 and M71 quickly, but soon realized that I was not even looking at Sagitta -- I had been fooled by a smaller asterism of similar appearance, just north of Altair; I am too used to the view in 5x24 or 6x30 finders; in the 10x50, the real Sagitta is much larger and more prominent. Never mind, there they were. Then I looked still further to the north and found M103 and M52, both somewhat granular in partially-resolved appearance.

Off to the east, now. M15 was very bright, but so centrally concentrated as to appear almost starlike at 10x. M2 was brighter still, and much more diffuse. This globular is an easy finder object, but there are few bright stars near it, so some people find it difficult to locate.

The sky to the northeast of my beach-side site was locally quite bright above the overlit electrical power plant whose stacks dominate the Monterey Bay horizon. It didn't seem worth bothering to try for M33, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I looked. The background sky was noticeably luminous through the 10x50, so things were not promising; nevertheless, after a bit of sweeping, I picked up the galaxy with averted vision, and was able to hold it steady by that means, even though I could not see it at all when looking straight at it. It was noticeably elongated; I suspect that in darker sky the 10x50 might show the first quarter turn of the arms of this big, face-on spiral.

The handle of the Big Dipper was low in the northwest. I could probably have pulled in M51 and M101 with averted vision, but they are worth waiting for, so I put the binocular away and drove home.