Third quarter moon, clear sky, warm weather, and a bright comet, brought a zoo of would-be astronomers to Fremont Peak State Park, near San Juan Bautista, California, on the evening of March 29. I arrived well after sunset, yet encountered heavy traffic in both directions on the twisty two-lane road to the summit. Cars were parked at the side of the road as much as a quarter mile from the telescopes areas, and rangers were playing traffic officer, guiding vehicles to the few spaces left. Fortunately, I knew the magic words: "I have a telescope. Can I set up in the south parking lot?" There was a gated-off area for just such folks as I -- not that we were trying to deter people from walking in and joining us, just that we wanted to keep cars with bright headlights from cruising through looking for parking.

It was a fine night. There was no fog on the coastal plain below, but the seeing settled down to excellent, and sky transparency was good. There were plenty of telescopes to take advantage of it -- I counted five big Dobsons, including two Obsession 18s and an Obsession 20, a 7-inch f/9 AstroPhysics EDT, and a host of smaller stuff. There were perhaps two dozen telescopes set up just in this one parking lot, and several other lots at Fremont Peak were in use as well.

I took the obligatory look at Comet Hale-Bopp with my 10x50 Orion Ultraview. Both the binocular and the naked eye showed eight to ten degrees of dust tail and twelve to fifteen of ion tail, as the comet descended toward the distant lights of Santa Cruz. With so many telescopes to mooch looks through, I was tempted not to set up any other equipment, but eventually I unpacked my 6-inch f/10 Intes Maksutov. I did not have a pre-planned observing list, but I had thought of something interesting to do.

As Leo neared the meridian, I centered Regulus and started playing with various eyepieces. With each one, I would ease the telescope north till the bright star lay just outside the field, then look carefully at what remained. The Intes is well-baffled, so there was no distracting glare from the star itself. Eventually, I found that at 75x, I could detect a faint, diffuse, glowing patch about a third of a degree north of Regulus. I called to a companion, observing nearby with a 10-inch Coulter Odyssey. After jiggling the tube and staring for a while, she confirmed the glow in my telescope, and then, after trying a couple of eyepieces, found it in her own. We both agreed that the apparition was magnification-sensitive, and that the view improved a notch or two above low power.

Then I walked over by the big Dobsons and asked if anyone wanted a look at the dwarf galaxy, Leo I. Not everyone could detect it in the six-inch, but most observers could hold it in the big Obsessions. This nearby galaxy is the brightest and easiest of the local dwarf ellipticals. It would be better-known if it were not so close to a bright star -- you do have to get Regulus out of the field to see it well, and it does help to know exactly where to look, too. I had seen Leo I several times before, but only in my Celestron 14 -- I was pleased but not too surprised that the Intes could pull it in -- that same telescope has shown both the Fornax and Sculptor dwarf galaxies, and they are substantially more difficult targets.

Next I dropped in a 5 mm eyepiece, and took a look at Mars at 300x. Syrtis Major was well placed, and Hellas to the south was so bright it looked like a polar cap. The Intes does well on planets, but a more dazzling view came from the 7-inch AstroPhysics -- at 430x, we could see Sabaeus Sinus, the tiny north polar cap rimmed by a dark ring, and a good deal of lumpy dark detail generally north of Syrtis Major. Later on, the owner put in a binocular viewer, which worked well for a change -- many people seem to have trouble fusing images through most such units, even those of us who are experienced users of conventional binoculars. This particular unit was by Zeiss, and though it seemed to have excellent optics, the manufacturer had inexcusably not provided any differential focus adjustment for persons with differing amounts of near- or far-sightedness in their eyes. Most of the Zeiss equipment I have seen has been second-rate, so I am not surprised that this design was bungled. But this time, everything worked, and the comfortable two-eyed view, seated in a padded observing chair, reminded me of looking through the old "ViewMaster" 3D binocular slide viewers.

The big AstroPhysics is an impressive telescope. Later on, we were looking at the Moon just after it cleared the horizon. It was thought-provoking to walk under the horizontal tube and have to reach up to touch it.

I did not get a look at Mars through any of the large reflectors, and I was disappointed to miss the chance. Other observers said they were showing more detail than the AstroPhysics seven. On such nights it must be frustrating to own a big telescope which is Dobson-mounted. The seeing was good enough that one might reasonably have wanted to use 1000x or more on Mars in the Obsession 20, but I would not have cared to try to track the planet by hand with that much magnification.

I switched back to deep-sky stuff with the Intes, and lined up M104 in my finder. A view through the main eyepiece revealed nothing but blackness, whereupon I realised I had not changed eyepieces. "Why not?", I thought, feeling fey, so I found and centered the galaxy with lower magnification, then put the 5 mm Lanthanum back in place. It's novel to have a diffraction-limited view of a faint fuzzy, but at 300x, M104 clearly showed the dust lane, with hints of structure at its edges, and a nucleus that was starlike at the resolution limit of the telescope. Perhaps it does have a black hole in it, after all.

Thus encouraged, I tried the same trick on M87. I had no idea of the position angle, size , or brightness of its famous "jet", but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Both I and my friend with the 10-inch thought we glimpsed a hint of structure in the slightly diffuse nucleus, perhaps a slight elongation north following, but a look through the 20-inch at 278x did not confirm, so no jet. Oh, well... (But on the other hand, fine detail in the nucleus might have been obscured in the general glare at a magnification that was so low -- for a 20-inch -- and we were unable to use more because of tracking difficulty.)

It was fun to compare views in the Intes with those in larger telescopes. An Obsession 18 showed the "black eye" in M64 at a glance, at 100x, but it took averted vision at 47x and at 75x in the smaller instrument. The owner of a 14.5-inch Dobson asked me to confirm faint globular NGC 5053 for him, at a magnification somewhat over 100x, which I did. Later I was able to show it to him in the Intes at 47x, just barely in the same field as neighbor M53, an interesting contrast in globulars. The Intes had no trouble with NGC 5053; indeed, I have seen it in a 90 mm refractor.

I had a nice view of NGC 3242, the "Ghost of Jupiter" planetary, in an Obsession 18. At 100x, the view resembled that in long-exposure photographs -- a central star, surrounded by a bright ring, embedded in a fainter glow that was somewhat larger. The only time I have previously looked at this planetary was in my Celestron 14; then I used 559x, to show the detail more clearly.

A couple of wonderful views wrapped up my night. M51 showed a turn or more of several spiral arms, plus the bridge to the companion NGC 5195, in the 20-inch at 114x. The star clouds looked much as they do in long-exposure photographs. The 7-inch AstroPhysics showed M13 resolved to the core, with the "propeller" pattern of dark lanes well seen. And just after moonrise, the same instrument showed the Straight Wall brightening in the rays of the late afternoon sun.