El Nino -- known as el No-no to would-be observers -- having abated somewhat, central California coast amateur astronomers had two good nights at Fremont Peak, on April 17 and 18, 1998. Friday was darker and clearer than Saturday, but fewer observers turned up -- I had only one companion in the southwest parking lot, though there were other telescopes in the "Coulter Row" area. On Saturday, the turnout was higher -- the southwest lot was chock-a-block full of large Dobsons big refractors, and the like.

I took my Intes Mk 67 6-inch f/10 Maksutov both nights, and continued my survey of the Herschel list. I logged 104 objects from that list which I had not previously seen -- not bad for two nights' work.

There were a couple of telescope types that I had not seen before. The other southwest-lot denizen on Friday had a Vixen 20x125 binocular -- one of the units that Telescope and Binocular Center has been selling for a few months now -- and by coincidence, a different person brought a Vixen 30x125 binocular on Saturday. I got a look through both, though of course there was no chance to do a side-by-side comparison. These are both impressive binoculars. The optics were good, with stars in focus all the way across the fields. Eyepieces focus individually. The units felt very solid mechanically, and were heavy enough that if was a rather fussy chore to make small corrections to where they were pointing, on Vixen's simple altazimuth yoke mount, which has no slow motions. I kept looking for handle bars, or some kind of handgrip with a long lever arm, as an aid to pointing them.

My views through both binoculars were brief, but spectacular. I didn't look through the 20x125 till its owner was about to leave, but a few seconds sufficed to line it up on the core of the Virgo galaxy cluster, where Messier galaxies M60. 59. 58, 87, 86, and 84 were bright and obvious, and many fainter galaxies could be seen as well. My view through the 30x125 on the next evening had both M97 and M108 in the field of view. M108 showed its long, slightly irregular shape -- I think this object should be called the Pussycat Nebula, just so we could speak of the Owl and the Pussycat. In any case, the big binocular clearly showed the "eyes" in M97.

What a shame Vixen doesn't have a 125 mm binocular with interchangeable eyepieces, though. I expect it took some design work to get the images as good as they were all across the fields, but even so, there ought to be a way to interchange modules at some level in order to vary the magnification. I expect 80x or so would be very useful for hunting faint fuzzies with these big binoculars.

Another observer had a six-inch Takahashi fluorite, the largest fluorite doublet I have yet seen. It was doing quite well when I looked at zeta Boo through it, though the eyepiece and Barlow combination that delivered 480x was not entirely satisfactory. I had better definition, I thought, with the same eyepiece and no Barlow, at 240x. I called the star split in any case, though the seeing was not steady enough to hold the dark line between the two stars. My Intes also delivered a nice split of zeta Boo, at 375x. Zeta is closing -- _Sky_Catalog_2000.0_ indicates a present separation only a bit above 0.8 arc seconds, which is beginning to be demanding for a six-inch aperture.