Cancer wasn't quite so obscured at Pacheco early in the evening though and I managed to find M44 and M67. I also trekked through Leo, Ursa Major and the Virgo Supercluster. I managed to spot M108 and M109 early in the evening, then I moved on to Leo and found M65, M66 and NGC3268(?) all in the same field on my 40mm 2" UO ocular. I spent most of the evening at 37x with a 1.9 degree FOV as higher powers didn't seem to help bring out galaxy detail. I also found M105 and M96 but couldn't see M95 - I thought I saw something pop into view once or twice but it was so faint I couldn't be sure. Virgo is a lot of fun. I have some difficulty verifiying the actual galaxies I see there and I didn't find Sky Atlas 2000.00 much help as the galaxies are lumped so closely together. However, I pointed my Telrad up toward M84 and M86, found them after first finding M87 and a number of other galaxies. With the 40mm ocular in my Intes 6" Mak the galaxies were filling up the field 3, 4 and 5 at a time! I also had a look at M3, M13, and M5.

Sure, the conditions were crummy but I had a lot of fun. I also had a chance to borrow and try out a Lumicon 80mm finder on my Intes Mak. I put a 90 deg diagonal in it with my Meade 24.5 superwide ep and I was off to the races! This arrangement gave me about 12X with a 5.5 fov which is very close to the fov in my 10x50 binos. I spotted a number of galaxies with the 80mm finder and found that it was SO much nicer to use a right angle finder (saves you from kneeling down under the scope and tweaking your neck). This was on of my most productive evenings in terms of finding new objects and that 80mm finder really made all the difference. Also the UO 40mm MK70 is proving to be a valuable tool for galaxy hunting and what a pleasure it is to see 3 galaxies in one field!