by Jay Reynolds Freeman
The early onset of clouds cut short, but did not eliminate entirely, a mid-week viewing session at Montebello Open Space Area, in the hills above Palo Alto, California. Weather forecasts for the third-quarter Moon weekend looked depressing, so I had pressed for a close-in session on March 22. Montebello has good southern horizons, and one can work galactic clusters in moderately bright sky, so I decided to bring Harvey, my Celestron 14, and try some serious deep-sky work. I had never used the big Schmidt-Cassegrain at a site so close to an urban area.
I arrived a few minutes after sunset, and was ready to go before the end of twilight. A few other observers drove in while I was setting up. High cirrus from an approaching weather system walled the northwestern sky, and overtopped the zenith after about an hour, but Moon rise was only a few minutes past nine PM, so we got most of the deep-sky opportunity we were going to have.
While waiting for the end of twilight, I looked at Jupiter and Saturn, low in the west, but seeing was poor. Mars was there, too, with no detail visible on its tiny disc, even closer to the horizon. Yet at only 98x, I could see six stars ("A" through "F") in the Trapezium, so things were less fuzzy farther up the sky. Good views of Messier galactic clusters gave hope that my plan would succeed, and succeed it did. I ended up logging eight or ten new-to-me open clusters from my cats and dogs list, and as the cloud cover encroached from the northwest I simply worked farther and farther south. I ended up nosing around in the vicinity of gamma and lambda Velorum. The large aperture of the big Celestron was a real win; I generally take smaller telescopes to this site, but less aperture would have had no chance with most clusters so close to the horizon, even ones that would be bright enough for three-inch aperture if they were higher up.
Clusters I looked at included Ru 11, Haffner 23, Collinder 132 and 135 (both of the latter two are enormous finder objects), Basel 11A, Haffner 6, vdB-Ha 47, vdB-Ha 56, NGC 2670, and Pismis 10. Most were resolved at 98x, the exceptions being Haffner 6, which was perhaps only granular, and Pismis 10, so low as to be barely detectable as a glow through horizon haze.
Everyone else pulled out at about Moon rise. I stuck around for a few minutes longer, hoping the sky would clear. It didn't, so I took down and went for coffee. It was a quite good night, though too short, and proof positive that with a large telescope, one can do serious deep-sky work only a few miles from a major suburban area.