One classic remedy for a toothache is to hit yourself over the head until your new bruises hurt more. By the same token, there is nothing like a full moon near deep-sky targets to make you forget about artificial light pollution. I hauled my Vixen 70 mm fluorite refractor out into my yard in Palo Alto, California, on the first evening of 1999, for a look at some Messier open clusters. I knew that sufficient magnification would likely darken the sky background enough to make it possible detect almost as many of their stars as on a darker night.

I have been using a Vixen 8-24 mm zoom eyepiece for my Messier survey with this telescope. On the night in question, its virtues were very desirable -- I could work at the low end of its magnification range, and have a full two degree field for tracking things down, then shorten the focal length to darken the sky for a better look, all much faster than switching eyepieces.

M41, in Canis Major, was my first target, and was very easy. I had no trouble seeing many of its members at 23x -- the 24 mm end of the zoom -- but even so, dialing in 70x made the view prettier and showed more stars.

Next I went after M46 and M47, side by side in Puppis. M47 is another easy bright-sky target, sparse and full of bright stars, but M46 was quite difficult -- detectable only intermittently at the lower magnification, and showing relatively few of its stars even at 70x. Its embedded planetary nebula, NGC 2438, was invisible to me even at the higher magnification.

M50, in Monoceros, was of interim difficulty, as were M48 in Hydra and M93 in Puppis. Each of these clusters was easy to find at the lower magnification, though not as splashy as M41 or M47.

Having logged the clusters, Orion beckoned. I centered the field on the Trapezium and increased magnification. At 70x, seeing jitter was only occasionally visible, and I had occasional glimpses of the "F" star. Switching eyepieces to a 4 mm Orthoscopic yielded "E" as well.

As a coarse quantitative measure of the Moon's brightness, I noticed that even with the zoom eyepiece set at 8 mm focal length, giving a 1 mm exit pupil, the background sky still looked bothersomely bright. When I observe from my yard on a clear moonless night, using the same telescope and eyepiece, sky brightness drops to a level I do not consider objectionable by the time I have reduced exit pupil size to 2 mm or so. With the full Moon high in Gemini, it took the 4 mm eyepiece -- a half millimeter exit pupil -- to achieve that condition.