Readers of my previous postings about Refractor Red, my dayglow-hued Vixen 55 mm fluorite, will recall that my observing program with it included a Messier survey attempt from my yard, in the suburbs of San Francisco. On the evening of 16 September, 1998, I took the telescope into the driveway of my home in the flatlands of Palo Alto, California, to tackle the last five objects. They included three that I had anticipated would be the most difficult in the entire project. I was not disappointed.

Messier 33 was not far from the zenith, so I decided to try it first, on the theory that if I could not find it, I might as well turn in for the night. Using the 12 mm Brandon that has been my standard eyepiece for nearly all these observations, I swept the familiar area, near the acute point of Triangulum. At 37x, the Brandon has an actual field a little over a degree, and on several sweeps over the same area, I saw a diffuse glow rather less than half the field diameter. I could see it best when the telescope was moving, but it was still steadily detectable with averted vision when the field was stationary.

Thus encouraged, I knocked off M34 quickly -- at 37x it was well resolved and easy to find, once I managed to figure out that beta Andromeda is not gamma Andromeda. It was the only easy Messier object for the night. Then I moved the telescope to the field for M74. This galaxy is smaller and fainter than M33, but it seems to have a higher surface brightness, at least in its central portions -- I found it rather more easily than M33, and could hold it with direct vision.

M77 was further south, down in the top of the light wall of Silicon Valley, but it is much brighter and more concentrated than either M74 or M33, and was correspondingly easier to locate.

The last object on the list was M76, which has proven to be the most difficult in several Messier surveys I have done with 50 mm aperture, because of small size and faintness. Yet the higher magnification of the Brandon, compared to the 7x and 10x of my 50 mm binoculars, and to the 24x I routinely used with the Meade 165 refractor, darkened the sky background and made the detection easier -- I rated the Little Dumbbell less difficult than M33, and logged the Messier survey complete.

It was a lot of fun going through Messier's catalog in such a demanding location as the yard of a home in a thickly-settled portion of the suburbs of a major metropolitan area. No doubt the superb optics of the 55 mm Vixen fluorite objective and the Brandon eyepiece helped, but I suspect that they weren't worth too many millimeters of aperture -- a 60 mm drug-store refractor with the standard el cheapo 20 mm Huygenian eyepiece would likely have done just as well. I suspect the success of this project had more to do with (1) consistent use of such items from the deep-sky observer's bag of tricks as averted vision, and moving or jiggling the telescope, (2) the use of excellent charts when necessary to pin down the location of objects exactly -- _Uranometria_2000.0_ or _Millennium_Star_Atlas_, and (3) the unconventionally high magnification that I used -- the 12 mm Brandon gives a 1.5 mm exit pupil with this telescope, which is a lot more than many authorities recommend for deep-sky observation, but the Messier objects generally have relatively high surface brightness, so that magnification is appropriate, the more so because it drives down the apparent brightness of the background sky.

In any case, it can be done. I hope that the possessors of little telescopes in areas where the sky is not as dark as one might wish, will take encouragement from my experience, and do likewise, I also encourage observers who have difficulty finding Messier objects from darker sites with apertures of six or eight inches, or even more, to realize that they have scarcely scratched the capabilities of their equipment.