I went out to Jim's place at about 8 pm Wednesday night and set up my 15". Since the moon was still up we looked at the craters along the terminator in the early evening and enjoyed high power views of the moon. I thought about Jim Lovell being so close to it and never landing on the moon. I turned the scope to Orion and easily identified the "E" and "F" stars in the Trapezium. The seeing seemed to be pretty stable. I had Orion nebula at 190X. I then turned the scope to Saturn. It was a nice view at 190X with the Cassini division easily seen. The banding on the globe was apparent too. The next object I went to was NGC 2440 in Puppis. This is a strange planetary that the Hubble Space Telescope imaged. It was a nice view at 245X with the OIII filter but I wanted to move on to the Eskimo Nebula so I didn't increase the power. The Eskimo Nebula looked nice at 245X but since the seeing was stable I cranked the magnification up to 350X. I could definitly see the outer "parka" as well as the inner shell of gas. Jim liked the view so much he put his 9mm Nagler on it in the 25". He said this was about 350X and it looked much brighter in the 25". Now this is where it gets interesting. His scope has a focal length of 3175mm because it is an f/5 scope. I suggested he try my 5mm Radian in his scope. Well, that would put it at 635X according to my math but he had a 1.4X Parracor inserted in the focuser. That would raise the power to 889X. I looked in the eyepiece and saw a huge planetary nebula. The view was magnificent at that power. The inner and outer halos were very obvious to see. He then put in the 2X Powermate and reached 700X with the 9mm Nagler. I've never seen the Eskimo so good in my life. I then punched in NGC 3242, the Ghost of Jupiter while Jim decided to view Copeland Septet. I love the blue color of this nebula. I started out at 245X and the view was good so I thought I'd put in the 4mm Radian. This gives me 430X on my scope. At this power I could see the central star in the nebula. The view was awesome at this power. this nebula has an inner halo and an outer halo as well. I then looked at all seven members of Copeland's Septet. They were faint and the moonlight didn't help much but we saw every member of the galaxy cluster. Jim printed out a chart from MegaStar. I looked at several bright galaxies including NGC 2903, NGC 4565, and M64, and M108. I used about 145X for these galaxies to get a darker background. I found the Owl Nebula next and viewed at at 245X. I then tried for IC 3568 in Camelopardalis. This is one of the nebulae that the Hubble Space telescope imaged. I thought I identified the planetary at 245X. I upped the magnification to 350X and noticed a faint 14.6 star next to the nebula. It is a small round bright planetary. It was sketched by Jay McNeil in the '99 Jan issue of Sky and Telescope. Once again it looked better and brighter in the 25". By this time the moon had gone down and I turned my scope over to Virgo. I viewed several pairs of galaxies including the "Eyes", "Siamese Twins", and NGC 4216, a nice edge-on galaxy. I worked my way south in Virgo till I came to an interesting group of galaxies. I viewed the five brightest members of the NGC 4270 group. By the way, this is a Herschel object Rich. I'll have to get a better look in darker skies next time. I worked my way down to the quasar 3C 273. It looked like a blue dot. By this time, Lyra was rising so we took a look at the Ring Nebula with the bino-viewer in the 25". I never get tired of the smoke ring. We also got a wonderful view of M13 and M51 with the bino-viewer in the 25". M13 looked 3D in the binos. The bino-viewer seems to excel on bright objects. We finished up with M81 and M82 and called it a night about 2:30am. Debbie