Extremely hot weather in the first week of August, 1998, made me reluctant to enter my non-air-conditioned home after work, even well past sunset, so on several nights I set up a telescope in the somewhat cooler yard, for a few hours' observing. A waxing gibbous Moon combined with Palo Alto, California's regular light-pollution to make it difficult to do Messier or Herschel-400 observations with Refractor Red, my 55 mm Vixen fluorite refractor -- these have been my standard in-town observing programs for some months -- so I did something else.

Targets were limited to high-magnification stuff like the Moon, Jupiter (if I stayed up late), and double stars, and I wanted equipment that was easy to cart outside and that came to thermal equilibrium quickly, so I set my Brandon 98 mm refractor up on my Great Polaris (GP) mounting, and left it ready to go in the living room. That "98" is not a typo, incidentally: Some previous owner bored 4 mm more out of the front of the cell of what once was a Brandon 94.

The stubby f/6.7 refractor is an easy carry for the Great Polaris, is light enough so that I can pick up the whole thing at once, and is compact enough that I am not too likely to knock pieces off on the door frame. I attach battery container and drive electronics to one leg of the GP tripod with Velcro and bungee cord, so there is nothing to do outside but open up the optics and add an eyepiece.

I have a problem with an equatorial at home. My yard has many trees, and I am forever moving the telescope to find sky to look at. I don't care to take time to keep doing polar alignments. No matter, by preadjusting the polar axis elevation to my latitude and jiggering the legs of the tripod around, I can get the polar axis within several degrees of where it ought to be, just by eye, and that results in a drift rate of objects in the eyepiece that is less than an arc-minute per minute. That's small enough for visual work.

So far this week, I have mostly been observing at 164x, using a Brandon 8 mm eyepiece and a Celestron Ultima 2x Barlow. The seeing hasn't been up to more, and 164x will probably show me almost all the detail the 98 mm Christen triplet has to offer, anyway.

The Moon has been the showpiece. On the first night out, I caught the terminator just past Aristarchus, and had a nice view of Schroter's Valley and of Aristarchus rilles I and II. Further south, Rupes Liebig and several of the Mersenius rilles were well placed with respect to the terminator, and easy to see. On subsequent evenings, I saw first the northern extremity and finally the full length of the Sirsalis rille, as well as Darwin rilles I and II. I also had a wonderful view of Grimaldi, just emerging from darkness. Much further south, Nasmyth and Phocylides looked like a giant footprint, with their common wall and its dark shadow separating the heel from the rest of the sole, and beyond them, at so low a sun angle that the convexity of its floor was obvious, and at a libration favorable enough to see it, was the great walled plain Bailly.

I only stayed up late enough for Jupiter one night. The 98 mm does a pretty good job on it -- one can see the shapes of the edges of some of the bands, and I chanced upon a Great Red Spot passage and the emergence of one moon from occultation by the planet.

The bright sky makes it hard to use a finder -- the limiting magnitude of the 6x30 that the Brandon presently has is probably no deeper than 5 or 6 in such conditions. Furthermore, the naked-eye limit is only 3 or 4, so there is a serious problem knowing how to point the finder in the first place. These problems led me to a new approach to finding double stars to look at.

What I did was work by repeated star-hopping from a quite bright star, using the main telescope at low magnification (24x with a 28 mm Meade Research-Grade Orthoscopic, which gives me a not quite two-degree field). I used volume two of _Sky_Catalog_2000.0_ together with _Uranometria_2000_ to look up and identify doubles near my bright star, then used the finder only to put the bright star in the field of the main telescope. It's no problem star-hopping eight or ten degrees with a two-degree field. When I got to the double, I swapped in more magnification for a better look, then went back to the low-magnification eyepiece, navigated back to the bright star, and went on to the next object. That worked quite well, and when I got lost, the bright star was not far off, and easy to locate again. In this manner I could find and study new doubles at one every three to five minutes, about as fast as if I had been working in dark sky.

My previous double-star survey was done using entries in the old _Atlas_Coeli_, which had a catalog limit rather brighter than _Sky_Catalog_2000.0_. So there are lots of new ones to be seen, even within the capability of so small an aperture as 98 mm. This kind of observing is a pleasant way to pass the warm summer evenings. I even manage to water my roses at the same time, moving the hose from one place in the garden to another in between doubles. So far I have managed not to drench the telescope in the process, but there's a first time for everything, I suppose.