Fremont Peak State Park was socked in on the evening of September 25, 1998. Clouds persisted almost all the way home, but the sky was clear in Palo Alto, so I set up Refractor Red, my dayglow colored 55 mm Vixen fluorite, in my yard, to search for Herschel-400 objects.

I had worked east to zero hours right ascension already, so it felt like something quite different as NGC numbers changed from high 7000s to just a few hundred. I started with NGC 247, three degrees south and one east of beta Ceti, because I had seen it in my Celestron 14 lately, to take advantage of the familiar field in ferreting out objects at the top of the Silicon Valley light wall. At 37x (12 mm Brandon), the galaxy wasn't as long or as easy as in the C-14, but it was there. Encouraged, I dropped five or six degrees further south, into increasing sky brightness, and found the bright galaxy NGC 253 -- how did Messier miss this one -- and the nearby globular, NGC 288. These are real treats in dark sky, but in city lights with 55 mm, it took averted vision to see more than a trace of them.

The large planetary nebula, NGC 246, was north a ways, in darker sky, thus much easier than the first three objects. The nearby small galaxy NGC 157 was tougher. Then came a long jump in declination, north to Cassiopeia and Andromeda, not far from the zenith. NGC 278 was difficult, and I had already looked at NGC 205 -- that's M110.

Next on the list was an infrequently looked at local galaxy, NGC 185, a degree or so west of omicron Cas. Good charts helped -- with Sky Publishing's new _Millennium_Star_Atlas_, (which weighs more than Refractor Red and costs nearly as much) I knew just where to avert my vision from, and there was the faint glow of the small elliptical. A similar system, NGC 147, lies only another degree or so west, and I found that too. I was very pleased to be able to track down these low surface-brightness objects with so small an aperture, from suburbia.

That was it for the night, though, for the onrushing marine layer blocked the rest of Cassiopeia even as I took aim at an open cluster. Yet the score wasn't bad for less than an hour's observing, and it was nice to be able to save something from the cloud-out at the Peak. My Refractor Red Herschel-400 survey stands at 273 down, 127 to go.