My observing program with Refractor Red, the dayglow-hued 55 mm Vixen fluorite that I have described here before, has slowed down, simply because I have worked hard on it. Two months ago I was setting up in haste after sunset, trying to log objects before they disappeared in the skyglow near the horizon, but now I am setting up late at night, looking for things that have just risen.

I am doing two Refractor Red projects at once. The first is a Messier survey from my yard in Palo Alto. I have done Messier surveys with smaller aperture, as small as a Meade 50 mm refractor, but from darker sky. With Refractor Red, however, I am attempting to push not only the limits of small aperture but also those of light-pollution. Palo Alto is not the brightest of the bedroom communities that line the shores of San Francisco Bay, but it is definitely suburbia. I have five objects to go, but they include some toughies: The five are M33, M34, M74, M76, and M77. M34 and M77 should be no problem, but to get the other three will take good conditions with the object on the meridian.

The second project is a Herschel-400 survey -- again, a push on the limits of small aperture. I am not attempting to do this entire survey from any particular site, though as a matter of convenience, I often set up in my yard, and see which of the objects that are well placed I can detect. I believe that half or more of the Herschel 400 can be detected with Refractor Red from Palo Alto. I have looked at 248 with Refractor Red so far, which includes all the ones from right ascension 10:00 eastward through 21:59. That's half the sky, with rather more than half the objects, because it includes both Virgo and the summer Milky Way. I suspect Refractor Red can do it, because several of the objects I have already logged are among the faintest in the Herschel 400, notably NGC 6118 and NGC 6540.

One key to these observations is more magnification than many authorities recommend. I most commonly use a 12 mm Brandon eyepiece, which gives 37x and a 1.5 mm exit pupil at Refractor Red's 440 mm focal length. That is a much smaller exit pupil than lots of people use for deep-sky objects, but I have found that for me, it provides best detectability of such high surface-brightness fuzzies as the central portions of galaxies, and galaxies constitute most of the Herschel 400 list. The small exit pupil also darkens the sky background: As long as I stay out of the street lights and maintain dark adaptation, Refractor Red at 37x doesn't lose much ability in Palo Alto, compared to its performance at darker sites.

While discussing the Herschel 400 list, I should take the opportunity to fix an error in a previous posting. A couple of months ago, I said that the existence of NGC 1999 -- a Herschel-400 object -- was in doubt. I was the victim of my own typographical error in another file; the doubtful NGC object I had in mind was NGC 1990, which is not in the Herschel 400. NGC 1999 is still there, as far as I know.

Refractor Red does yeoman duty of other sorts, as well. It is very portable and easy to set up, hence I take it frequently to friends' houses, and to the mid-week close-in star parties my observing group sometimes holds. On Wednesday, 12 August 1998, I was at such an event, showing celestial objects to some friends from work who had come up at my prompting. They seemed less intimidated by the small telescope than by the much larger Dobson-mounted Newtonians that several other people had brought. Since it takes only a few minutes to take down the telescope, I kept it set up longer than anybody else, so we could watch the Moon rise -- half hidden by horizon clouds, an interesting combination of the kind of Moon you might associate with Hallowe'en, with the rugged, cratered terrain that we all know.

Then I spotted Saturn just clearing the clouds north of the Moon, and pointed the little telescope at it. My friends were charmed and delighted at the tiny ringed image, lying like a piece of enameled jewelry against the black background of the night sky. How wonderful that a few tens of diameters magnification in a two-inch refractor can create such enchantment! What fun to introduce newcomers to such delights! And when I entered my observations for the evening in my logbook, I was bemused to note that I wasn't quite a newcomer myself any more -- that observation of Saturn was the ten thousandth in my current run of logbooks, which I have been keeping since 1978. And that's kind of fun, because it was a low-magnification view of Saturn in a two-inch refractor that started my own career as an amateur astronomer, long before I started keeping logbooks, when I was an eight year old fascinated with the sky and the things in it. I wonder if my friends will make it to ten thousand observations, too.