Well, early looks at the sky at sunset were not encouraging with a fair amount of cirrus all over the place. But, when I went out about 7, with a few stars popping out into the light-polluted skies, they seemed to have dissipated.

Now, the backyard is not the best observing environment in the world. It's in the middle of the suburbs and I can only look out to the northwest and west as the sycamore and pine (70' and 90' tall, respectively) more or less block out the rest of the sky. So I took what I could see, which turned out to be Cassiopeia and Perseus, for the most part. First thing I did was peek at Pleiades with the binoculars. Very fine. Very fine. Photons! At last! Ahhhhh....

Going on to the scope, I hunted up alpha-Cass and worked my way down the W, looking at clusters. First up was 7789, which was nice but of course not up to its full glory in the bright sky. Skipped down alpha-Cass. to beta-Cass. to eta-Cass., and looked for the unnumbered (in Sky Atlas 2000, anyway) cluster near eta. Not found. Continuing to gamma-Cass, 381 and 358 were found and ogled. Then on to phi-Cass looking for 436 and 457, nope and nope. Moved next to batch of five clusters not far from delta-Cass. Paydirt. All five were there, although a couple were pretty faint in the bright sky. M103 was the best of the crew, and a nice view. Not too much farther on from delta-Cass. are three more clusters, of which I found one (637) but the other two were too faint (609, 559) or lost into the Milky Way.

Drifted out of Cassiopeia and into Perseus now, going first for 774, another small cluster which was there but not spectacular tonight. Then I went and hunted up M76, tonight's token planetary. It was there--just--as a trace of a grey patch that moved with the star pattern. No detail. Then it was back across Perseus to the Double Cluster, a sparkler in almost any sky conditions; I spent a fair amount of time here, thoroughly enjoying the view, and soaking up photons to make up for the full month (!) of no observing due to clouds and rain around here.

From Double Cluster, I went over to gamma-Andromeda and enjoyed the beauty of the color-contrasted pair. After that, things started to get kind of sticky. I went for M34 next but just couldn't find it. Refusing to believe my star-hopping had completely evaporated, I eventually put my glasses back on to discover that a band of clouds had reappeared to the west and M34 was behind it. No wonder I couldn't find any stars to hop from in the finder. Scanned around and found that Orion had cleared the sycamore (barely...I did lose it now and again for a minute or so as twigs passed through the field of view). Got a truly fine view of M42. Five stars were visible in the Trapezium, with the fifth (E) coming and going with the seeing. It was there a second or two at a time, then would wink out coyly and reappear again in another second or so. The nebula itself was its usual glorious self. As the view time lengthened, more and more streamer detail became visible away from the main body of the nebula. Until....suddenly it became *very* nebulous and everything faded. The clouds had reached Orion now, tenuous grey fingers stealing away the views....

I switched over to Sirius, hoping to get a view or two of some clusters like M41 and M93 before the clouds got there too, but lost the race. Though Sirius itself was clearing the sycamore, the clusters to the south of it were hidden behind the back porch roofline. By the time they'd cleared by that, Sirius had fuzzed out as the grey fingers clutched at more and more of the sky.

I packed it in. It was 10 already--three hours had melted away as if they were only three minutes. So what if it was cut short by clouds, so what if it was light-polluted, so what if it was with a restricted sky view. No matter! The sky was back, and it was glorious.