On the weekend of October 16-17, 1998, many local observers went to Pacheco State Park, California, in the hills between Gilroy and Los Banos, several tens of miles inland from the more familiar Fremont Peak. Pacheco is bothered by seasonal fog and occasional winds, but is notably darker than Fremont Peak, unless there is low fog to block city lights from the latter site. The site is not normally open at night -- we had to make special arrangements with the ranger.

Friday evening began with enough wind to bother many of the large Dobson-mounted Newtonians. The owner of one 20-inch f/5 Obsession disassembled it, as one sure way to keep it from blowing around. That appeared to be all the sacrifice the weather gods required, however, for the wind dropped shortly thereafter. Seeing, on the other hand, was not so hot -- the wind was obviously mixing layers of air of different temperatures. At least there was no hint of dew.

So what? I had brought Harvey, my white Celestron 14, and was having a banner night under the dark sky, mostly chasing groups of galaxies at 98x. The Losmandy G-11 handles a C-14 well -- I did not notice the wind at that magnification. Groups of NGC galaxies are easy pickings with this telescope -- I have been using the _Millennium_Star_Atlas_, and by and large, I can see all the galaxies plotted, and then some. What I do is page through the atlas before a night's observing, and note down the approximate positions of groupings of galaxies that catch my eye. In the field, I locate some nearby identifiable star pattern with my finder, then star-hop from galaxy to galaxy, to see what I can see. My 40 mm Vernonscope Erfle covers something like a 40 arc-minute field, which is enough to make the search easy. Occasionally I drop in a higher magnification, to try to separate closely adjacent fuzzballs, or to look for something especially faint. There are nice groupings near each of NGC 735, NGC 969, NGC 980, NGC 519, and NGC 337, for example, and lots more. I logged about sixty galaxies Friday evening, most new to me.

I also looked at a globular cluster I had not seen before; namely, the brightest in M31, which is called "G1" in association with that galaxy -- there are "G1"s in other galaxies, too. This object is rather far from the center of M31 -- it lies almost exactly in the direction from the center of the galaxy to its star cloud NGC 206, but G1 is about four times as far from the center of M31 as is the star cloud. At 98x, it was obviously non-stellar, and the symmetry and central brightening strongly indicated its true nature. I was reminded of the naked-eye view of M13 from a dark site.

I went home just past midnight Saturday morning, but many observers spent the night at the site. I returned shortly before sunset, and set up Harvey once more. The second night was wind-free -- almost a flat calm. The air felt moister than the previous evening, so I put on Harvey's dew cap (an Orion model), but my fears were unfounded, for at the end of the evening even the top of my car was still dry.

It was indeed dark. I didn't think so till I noticed my hand was casting a casually visible shadow on the white pages of my various charts. The light source was Jupiter.

Seeing was better. It started so-so, but improved as the night wore on. I had some nice views of Jupiter and Saturn at 244x (16 mm Brandon), with moments of very fine detail. A friend with a 155 mm Astro-Physics EDF reported that there was one period of particularly fine seeing, that occurred when I, unfortunately, was observing galaxies -- and he didn't tell me at the time! (I fixed him -- I told him what deep-sky weasels do to big refractors -- we drill through the objectives, to install Newtonian diagonals on a stalk... :-) )

Jupiter had several big festoons or garlands early in the evening, then later, when the spot formerly known as Great Red came around, there were hints of textured detail inside it, and its border appeared unusually wide and dark. Saturn easily showed the Crepe Ring and the Cassini Division, and a wide band on the southern hemisphere of the planet. The globe of Saturn looked slightly yellow, compared to the rings. At roughly the same magnification as my 244x, the AP 155 showed all the Saturn detail that the C-14 did, but the color difference did not appear to me to be as pronounced. No doubt Harvey's brighter image helped see it.

An observer close to me had a 7-inch Dobson-mounted Newtonian -- I think a StarMaster -- with Saturn in the field. It too showed about the same amount of detail as the C-14. This observer was using a Vixen 8-24 mm zoom eyepiece and a Barlow, to obtain about the same magnification. We chatted briefly about this zoom unit -- I have one too, but did not use it that weekend. He agreed, that one of its particular uses is to find the sometimes narrow range of best magnifications for an object.

I tried for a split of gamma-two Andromeda at 489x, but the steady seeing was not nearly good enough, and in several minutes of watching I did not get a moment steady enough even to hint at elongation. Harvey has split gamma-two Andromeda, with plenty of separation, on good nights in the past.

I spent several hours with Harvey, again mostly chasing galaxy groups, logging more than fifty galaxies. Then I stowed the big Celestron's optical tube assembly, and entered my candidate for the most ridiculously overmounted telescope in known space -- I put Refractor Red, my 55 mm f/8 Vixen fluorite refractor, on the Losmandy G-11 mount.

There was method to my madness. Often what determines when I take down Harvey is the fact that the OTA is heavy, cumbersome, fragile, and expensive: I don't want to risk dropping it after a long night, when I am only half awake. But the rest of the mount is pretty bullet-proof, and I don't mind fussing sleepily with a lighter and less costly telescope. I usually use a light altazimuth mount with Refractor Red, but its non-telescoping legs would make an awkward addition to the stack of Harvey stuff already in the back of my Geo Metro. And I did have a Losmandy universal dovetail plate and appropriate fittings and fasteners handy. I did not have a light enough counterweight to balance the system about the right ascension axis -- the counterweight shaft alone was not sufficient to do so, and even one of the three 21-pounders I use with Harvey was way too much. Yet the G-11 was happy driving the imbalanced load, and I found a clutch setting where the telescope did not swing of its own accord.

It sure looked silly, but it sure was fun. Even a telescope as small as 55 mm benefits noticeably from a drive to keep objects in the field, and the adjustable clutches and variable-rate slow motions were useful as well. I went through a dozen and a half Herschel-400 objects at 37x (12 mm Brandon) in short order -- 314 down, 86 to go -- gave a lovely view of the double cluster to folks who were curious about the tiny day-glow telescope, then paired an 8 mm Brandon with a 2x Celestron Ultima Barlow, for a view of Jupiter and Saturn at 110x. Jupiter was crisp, but the view was not nearly as impressive as it had been in the larger telescopes -- much of the fine detail that they showed was not visible in the smaller unit. Saturn, on the other hand, did not have much fine detail in the large-aperture views, so it lost little in the way of aesthetics. The Cassini Division and the broad band in the southern hemisphere were still visible, though I could not see the Crepe Ring.

The Pacheco State Park site is a clear winner for local observing, at least when it is not in its fog season. I expect we will go back.