I arrived at the Montebello parking lot at 7:00pm last night. Jay Freeman, permit copy in hand and lock combo in head, arrived a few minutes later. Although it was a relatively short night, we managed to get in a couple of hours of observing between cirrus waves before a relatively solid blanket moved in over the west bay hills. We were joined by two other gents (forgive me guys, but I'm running a mental block on your names at the moment), and very informally looked at a smattering of objects. Here are a few of the highlights:

Once the first cirrus wave passed us by (well, sort of anyway), pointing Jay's 70mm Fluorite in the direction of Orion revealed six visible stars in the Trapezium. E was visible most of the time, with F coming and going with the seeing. As bright and unsteady as the sky was (no fog filling up the valley as reported the evening before), I was amazed to see F at all. But there she was. Beautiful airy disks around the brighter stars. Jay's scope is *really* nice.

A quick view of Jupiter in my 12" espresso machine was about as disappointing as one can get. Unless you like rainbows. Jupe was dancing all over the place, a real disaster. Saturn wasn't much better (uh, those *are* rings, right?), so it was off to other objects.

With Jay quickly calling out about a half dozen Messier numbers, I hit several open clusters in the general vicinity of Orion. I'll have to admit that I don't usually get too excited about most of them, even though I consider a fair number of them quite beautiful. Among the targets were NGC 2169 (relatively small but nice to look at) and NGC 2175 (quite a few more stars, and much larger. No sign of the diffuse nebula [NGC 2174] which accompanies the cluster. [Can this be detected with a 12"?])

Although a bit low in the muck, following the open clusters I snuck a peek at globular M15 in Pegasus. One of my favorites. Very bright with a rapid increase in luminosity as you move towards the core. Averted vision seemed to resolve some of the outer stars, but it may have been averted imagination last night. Headed next for M1. The Crab looked relatively dim, a bit washed out. An Orion Sky-Glo filter helped a bit, and I think Jay detected a bit more than just a blob.

Someone suggested a look at M33 in Triangulum, so off we went. First impression of the Pinwheel Galaxy is large and faint, a relatively bright nucleus, with another bright fuzz ball in the same field of view, maybe 10 to 15 arcmins or so away from the nucleus. A quick trip to Tirion's Sky Atlas didn't show anything, so out came Uranometria. Sure enough, there was NGC 604. Jay's first view at the eyepiece also picked up hints of other nebulosity (H-II regions?) in M33; Uranometria identified them as NGC 588, 592 & 595. Each was quite different in size and brightness. (Thanks for guiding me through them, Jay.)

The highlight of the evening (well, at least for me!) came with another trip back to Orion. While Jay centered the field, I grabbed the H-Beta, and we went hunting for B33. Took Jay about a millisecond to grab the Horsehead, and he was kind enough to guide the rest of us to the "black on blacker" area. Under these conditions I didn't think it would be possible to see this thing, but a bit of averted vision and a tap of the telescope confirmed it was definitely there! Really amazing.

The night finished off with a view of three planetaries. First was NGC 2022, a small planetary in Orion between Betelgeuse and Lambda. Fairly bright at 12th mag, and I believe I detected a darker center. (Maybe someone can confirm this for me. With the soup thickening up, I didn't bother to grab the O-III filter.) Next was a trip to Ursa Major to check out M97. What a waste. The Owl Nebula was barely visible; brighter on bright would be the best way to describe it. And last was a trip to Gemini to check out NGC 2392, the Eskimo Nebula. This one was fun to play with. I cranked up the power a bit, going from 117x, to 170x to a little over 500x. Still looked *very* nice, and the central star (9th mag?) was very easy to see.

Started breaking down the LX200 around 9:30pm or so, and Jay and I departed the area around 10:00pm, chased by clouds.