Telescope Reviews: Old friends in the sky

A little bit of information about my binoculars since many members may have never used older models. They are twenty two year old Orion 10 x 70 binoculars that use BK7 glass in their prisms. So when looking through them in the daytime one sees a squarish exit pupil versus a round one.
The seeing conditions that night were poor as everything except for Jupiter was scintillating and the transparency was average. There was a brisk twenty mile per hour breeze and the temperature was a mild, for this time of the year, 36°F. Under those observing conditions stars fainter than around fifth magnitude were occasionally blinking out of sight when viewed with the unaided eye. All observations were made with the binoculars being hand held while I stood or leaned against buildings in our yard.
The first deep sky object was M74 in Pisces which is a face on spiral galaxy. Through the binoculars using direct vision it appeared as more of an ellipse than a circle. This deviation from a circle was most likely caused by a few foreground Milky Way stars.
The next object that I wanted to view was M77 in Cetus. Just then the wind began blowing harder and a cat, one which was obviously miffed that I had not provided a ladder for him to perch on, decided to climb up my leg several times. By now my hands felt like they were frozen so I removed the cat one more time and stepped out of the wind. I really need an observing assistant to pay attention to the cats or else have my wife come out with her squirt bottle full of cold water. Scratched in the following order were my legs (dug up by the cat's claws), observing M77, and the cats neck. A quick peek at Jupiter ruined my dark adaptation for a few minutes so I decided to look at M31 in Andromeda and it was not as large as I had expected it to be. I was surprised at how much was damage Jupiter had done to my night vision. The affect of viewing a bright planet seems to me to be much more subdued when using a telescope (non binoviewer) as compared to using binoculars. Putting down my binoculars I was seeing two dark spots in front of me after viewing Jupiter similar to what happens when viewing the moon through my telescope.
Next up were the two globular clusters M13 and M92 in Hercules. M13 was much more impressive than M92. Both were nice fuzz balls with brighter cores. Sticking with globular clusters I tried for NGC 7006 and NGC 6934 in Delphinus. Although faint and revealing no detail, NGC 6934 was easy to find. However I struck out with NGC 7006.
In Andromeda the edge on galaxy NGC 891 was visible using direct vision as a faint sliver of light. It was a little more ghostly looking than M33 in Triangulum.
Nearby in Perseus are the open clusters M34, and the double cluster (NGC 869 and NGC 884) all of which were resolved into stars. I took one final look at Jupiter and M31 then went in for the night.

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Ted