On the evening of 25 November, 1998, while observing from Fremont Peak State Park, near San Juan Bautista, California, I finished the survey of Herschel-400 objects that I have been working on with Refractor Red, my 55 mm Vixen fluorite with the dayglow tube. I also logged six stars in the Trapezium with the same instrument.

A survey of the Astronomical League's Herschel "400" list has been my prime observing program with the little telescope for six months. When I started out, I was by no means sure I was going to be able to detect all of these objects, but after I successfully located several very tough ones in the summer sky, I became pretty certain that the instrument was capable of the task. I entered November with 86 objects to go, but four rather late nights in my yard in Palo Alto reduced that to 25, and consultation with a planisphere indicated that if the weather would cooperate, I had a chance to finish the rest from Fremont Peak without staying up much past two in the morning: Clear sky and lack of light domes would make the open clusters in the Puppis and Pyxis Milky Way detectable not long after they cleared the southeastern horizon.

A lull between fronts made the evening before Thanksgiving look promising, so I headed off after supper, to find Fremont Peak with clear sky and good seeing, totally unoccupied, and not even too cold -- calm conditions and a subsidence condition after the front created a temperature inversion and kept the moisture and cold air low. In about two hours I had wrapped up the survey.

The last night created no particular sense of climax; most of the objects were pretty easy, and the final one that I happened to look at was NGC 2903, an elongated galaxy bright enough that Messier could have seen it. However, the evening underscored several previous experiences I have had while conducting this program, and I shall repeat them here:

1. An aperture of 55 mm is plenty for substantial amounts of deep-sky observation. Folks who think you need at least a six-inch telescope to tackle the Messier objects (which I finished with Refractor Red a couple of months ago) and an eight- to twelve-inch for the Herschel 400, are simply wrong.

2. Dark sky helps, but when observing high surface-brightness deep-sky objects at appropriate magnifications, a telescope gives up surprisingly little capability when used in suburbia. About half of my 55 mm Herschel 400 observations were logged from my yard in Palo Alto, one of the many suburbs that line the shores of San Francisco Bay. In fairness, Palo Alto has darker sky than many neighboring towns, since the city has much tree cover and makes systematic use of full cutoff lighting, but notwithstanding, it is suburbia still. I did have local lighting problems, though: I had to think carefully about where to put the telescope to keep street lights and neighbors' house lights out of my eyes.

3. The right magnification for most of this stuff is considerably higher than many observing manuals say. After modest experimenting, I standardized on a 1.5 mm exit pupil, using a 12 mm Brandon eyepiece for 37x. That is three to five times as much magnification as some of the older writings suggest. The capability of that much magnification to darken the sky background is one reason why the telescope works so well in town. Some times, I went to higher magnification, when object or conditions warranted. It took more magnification confidently to distinguish several of the Herschel 400 planetary nebulae from stars, and on a couple of occasions I found myself looking for open clusters against an unusually bright sky background, and went to higher magnification -- sometimes as much as 110x (0.5 mm exit pupil -- 4 mm Meade Research-Grade Orthoscopic eyepiece) to darken the sky and make the stars show up.

4. Many objects would have been very difficult and perhaps impossible if I had not known exactly where to look: The detections I made of them were not nearly as easy as would be required for "discovery" observations, or for observing with only an approximate position given. To obtain positions with the requisite accuracy, I used Millennium Star Atlas, whose limiting stellar visual magnitude of approximately 11 roughly matches the stars that are easy to see with Refractor Red at 37x.

5. Many of the tricks from the visual observer of faint fuzzies's collection were very important. I used averted vision, jiggled the telescope tube, hyperventilated, shut my eyes or covered them for minutes at a time to maximize dark adaptation, and so on, all to notable advantage. The hardest thing about these techniques was remembering to use them, and to use them in combination. It is much easier to give up, but if you don't look, you won't see.

At any rate, I hope my experiences will encourage those of you who have small telescopes and less than perfect conditions to try deep-sky observation even so. Refractor Red is an exquisite telescope, and a rather expensive one for its size, but none of its costly perfection was particularly relevant to the Herschel 400. I expect a 60 mm tasco could do just as well, using no eyepieces but the ones that came with it. Who will prove me right?

As the night wore on, I kept noticing that stars were not twinkling very much, which made me suspect good seeing. So when I finished the Herschel 400 list, I put in my Meade 4 mm Research-Grade Orthoscopic eyepiece (110x, 0.5 mm exit pupil), with the idea of trying some double stars. Orion was just transiting, so I lined up the Trapezium. To my surprise and delight, I could see six stars! Besides the ones that are called A, B, C, and D, in the usual notation, I could see E and F! I must hasten to add, that although any detection of the latter two stars with so small an aperture as 55 mm is spectacular, the quality of these particular detections was not spectacular by any means.

Star E was the easier of the two -- I could hold it with averted vision about twenty-five percent of the time. (I have no idea why averted vision helps detect a faint component of a multiple-star system, that is bright enough that it would be easy to detect without averted vision if it were off by itself, but it does.) I had no sense that the detection was seeing-limited -- seeing was pretty good, though no star in the Trapezium was bright enough to show diffraction rings, so I could not evaluate it via the traditional criteria of ring stability. Rather, I suspect that the detections were based on my using averted vision just the right way, and either holding my eye just still enough, or perhaps moving it in just the right way, and when everything added up all positive, the star popped out.

Star F was much harder. I could see it perhaps only five percent of the time, and whereas I might have spotted E if I had not known where to look, I don't think I would have made an unknowing detection of F. In those instants when I could see it, however, it was convincing.