I was one of the >20 and I can second the emotion. The fog layer did what we always hope it will do and often doesn't - hide the lights of Morgan Hill and Gilroy. The Bay Area produced a light dome to the NW, but on the whole it was quite dark.
The seeing was very good in the early going. I got clear views of polar hood and markings on Mars. I found that a light blue filter gave pleasing views. A Lumicon Deep-Sky filter, which has passbands in the red and blue-green, also did interesting things for Mars. It yields a view something like a NASA false-color image. It's great on the big planets, too.
Jay demonstrated a trick of using the lateral color of the eyepiece to compensate for atmospheric dispersion. The trick is simply to put the object off-center in the field.
These are the objects I logged, all with a C8:
Seen and not logged: Veil (E&W parts), Mars, a galaxy whose # I forget.
All in all, an excellent night.