The period started inauspiciously, with an evening at the Montebello Open Space Area on Tuesday, October 17, in which high broken cloud seemed too dense to warrant setting up Harvey, my Celestron 14. Eager to observe, I dug out a 10x50 binocular and chased Messier objects and other easy stuff through sucker holes, just for fun. Weather improved during the next few days, however, and on Wednesday and Thursday I set up Harvey at Montebello with good results. I made substantial inroads on my present main program of observing faint galaxies plotted on Millennium Star Atlas , working mostly the area from zero through four hours right ascension. Montebello is a surprisingly good deep-sky site when the transparency above is good, and when the objects do not have extremely low surface brightnesses.
Galaxies are just fine.
I set up Harvey in the lee of my minivan. Fortunately, most of the objects I wanted to observe were only part way up the sky, downwind. Many people forget that wind often imposes serious limitations on telescope operation. On Sunday, I was at Fremont Peak, and the wind had died. I had another good night with Harvey, though I quit at about midnight, because of work the next day.