Just wanted to let you all know that interesting observing can be done in less than perfect weather, from under city lights. On each of the nights of Monday 25 November, Tuesday 26 November, and Wednesday, 27 November, I was out in my driveway in Palo Alto, chasing down double stars with one or another small refractor -- I used my Vixen 102mm f/9.8 the first two nights, and my "Baby Brandon" 63 mm f/5.6 the third. Each of these refractors is a conventional doublet. Seeing was good enough the first two nights to warrant 250x on the Vixen -- the central portion of the Airy disc was for the most part well-defined, but rings were generally blurred out. On the third night, I dropped the same 4 mm eyepiece into the Baby Brandon, for 88x, which was really not pushing the telescope enough to say much about the seeing.

I recently refinished the Vixen from its atrocious Celestron black to refrigerator white, and it seems to gather much less dew in consequence -- the objective was clean after an hour and a half, on both nights, and so was the tube. The Brandon is still in its native robin's-egg blue, and although its objective stayed clean, the tube got a bit wet.

I resolved 52 new doubles (new to me, that is) on the three nights combined. It is neat to see the little Brandon split a 2.4-arc-second pair cleanly at only 88x. Actually, I find the greater challenge is with wider pairs of dramatically differing brightnesses; those can take some staring to be sure of. Most of these doubles took only a minute or two to find and split, notwithstanding that I was star-hopping under bright Moon with an altazimuth mount, but every night there were a few that were hard to identify, or where I got confused.