Last night's conditions were marginal at best but it has been so foggy
here and I had a brand new William Optics Dielectric Star Diagonal and
Televue 35mm Panoptic to play with so....

I got home from Umpiring about 2030 local time, quickly changed into
"viewing" clothes, and headed outside. Somebody must have been
smiling at me because I had set the tripod up before leaving and it
was almost dead on to Polaris so Polar (well, at least "Polaris")
aligning only took about 5 minutes. The Telrad went dead (low
batteries) after only about 20 minutes but that was no biggie.

After taking a few minutes to view Saturn (more to evaluate seeing
than anything else), I decided to find M35. Now, I have only viewed
this once, from outside of Lemoore Califormia in pretty dark skies.
Last night there was a LOT of moisture in the air and I couldn't make
out stars dimmer than about 3-3.5 even in the spotter scope. I
decided to try anyway.

Unfortunately, there were very few stars to guide my way. I star
hopped to where I thought I should be and swept the sky, but couldn't
find much of anything there. I did the same a couple of more times
before I decided I needed to cheat a little bit. I used the
telescope's "Identify" function and found that I was still almost 3
degrees off. After examining the star atlas again and the viewfinder,
I figured out that I wasn't seeing as many stars as I thought I was.
I located the correct star and put the finder scope about where I
thought I should be. BINGO! I had about 1/4 of the cluster in the
eyepiece and easily centered it.

I was able to resolve perhaps 40 stars in the cluster with a hint of
many more. I'm looking forward to viewing it again from a dark Sky
Location.

Unfotunately, high clouds were rolling in at this point and I was
fighting a losing battle with dew (rare down here) so I packed it in
after only about an hour.

Still, I got my "fix".

Clear Skies.

Mark