I don't usually report details of my Herschel-400 hunt with Refractor Red, because so many of the objects are so small and faint that the best I can do with 55 mm aperture is barely to detect them, and reporting a long list of "I saw it" is boring for us all. But on September 28-29, 1998, I went through some galactic clusters in the northern Milky Way that showed a little more detail.

I set up the little red fluorite doublet in my Palo Alto driveway an hour before Moon set, in a spot sheltered from street lights, put in my 12 mm Brandon eyepiece for 37x, and started working the area just north of the "W" of Cassiopeia. NGC 129 was the first object, and I was off to a good start, for it is large and relatively easy -- I logged it as "granular to resolved". NGC 136 was next, and much tougher -- the most difficult object of the evening, barely detectable with averted vision as a pale spot against the background sky. It took a long time to find, too, for I got confused doing the star hop from NGC 129 and did not realize it for a while. NGC 225 was another relatively easy target, again granular to resolved, but NGC 381 and 436 were undifferentiated smudges.

NGC 457 was spectacular. This delightful object bears such suggestive informal names as Dragonfly Cluster, Owl Cluster, and E. T. Cluster, for with two bright eyes at the top of crossing streaks of stars, it is not hard to imagine it representing either one. It is fun to look at in almost any small telescope or binocular.

The approach of clouds put a cramp in my style. I logged NGC 559 as merely seen, through thin overcast. It is fairly bright -- perhaps better conditions would have resolved it. Then I star-hopped from the fast-disappearing "W" to the location of h and chi Perseii, and waited for a break in the white. Presently the double cluster, NGC 869 and 884, popped out, both pretty and resolved, with many stars hinting of color, even on a moonlit suburban night fast becoming cloudy.

It is often a good observing trick to go through lots of objects close to one another in a single session. That saves repositioning the telescope, and facilitates star-hopping. As I wrote up my logbook for the evening, and entered the observations into my index of file cards, I noticed that I had made this sweep before. I observed most of these clusters on September 5-6, 1980 -- over eighteen years ago -- with my six-inch hand-held Newtonian, at 36x. And my only previous observation of NGC 225 was a day short of twenty years ago, with a 7x50 binocular. It's not too often that an observation with Refractor Red provides an increase in aperture, but it does happen.