I soloed at Montebello last night from 8 to 11 pm. Bob Czerwinski asked whether the parking lot would be Mud City after the recent rains. There was one puddle by the main gate, and some water visible in the lower edge of the parking lot near the trail head. Most of the parking lot was very firm hardpack however, and set up was no problem after one day of no rain.
Skies last night still had lots of moisture and bands of high clouds passing through, so it was not particularly dark or transparent. I looked at some galaxies in Pisces when that part of the sky was clear, but could only see brighter stuff. NGC 524 was obvious, for example, in the 7 inch Starmaster, but I couldn't pick out any of the fainter galaxies nearby.
The seeing on the other hand, was suprisingly good. Jupiters GRS was transiting and there was an incredible amount of detail visible in the swirls around and between the North and South Equatorial belts. The views last night of both Jupiter and Saturn were some of the best I've had in the last 6 weeks.
Given the reasonable seeing and bad transparency, I switched to double stars for awhile. The HB-Astroatlas indicates lots of unnamed doubles in any star field, and I had fun hopping from one to another looking at the different colors, magnitudes and separations in the Starmaster. Canon 15x45 binoculars did great on the stars listed in the recent "Binocular doubles for Autumn skies" article in Sky and Telescope. Many of the doubles are close enough that the author recommends 10x50 or 20x80 binoculars on a tripod mount to see them. The image stablization feature on the Canons made most of the star splits possible while handholding the binoculars.
Dew was a problem after an hour or so. I hooked some triple A batteries to the homemade resistor rings around my 7x35 finder scope to keep it clear.
Finished the night with some favorite Messiers and open clusters, and then a look at M42. The 6 stars in the trapezium looked great in the fairly steady skies, and the billowing nebulosity of M42 was its usual awe-inspiring self.