But it was difficult, right at the very limits of my skills and my equipment, and I never would have gotten it without S&T's excellent finder charts. Their ephemeris was right on. Score another one for Sir Isaac.

I picked it up about 10 PM, EST, on my lowest power eyepiece, 24X on my 4" Equatorial refractor. It was so faint I could barely see it, I had to use averted vision, and it kept popping in and out of view as the seeing changed. I couldn't really tell for sure if it was there, and I kept wondering if I really saw it or if I was just making it up because I wanted to see it so bad. But after following it for an hour, I was sure it was real. A lot of the field stars were on the chart, and it went down to my limiting magnitude which made it a lot easier, and it was easy to verify its position. It moved very slowly, you couldn't tell it was in motion unless it went very near a star, or if you could line it up with geometric figures of star combinations, and it kept popping in and out of view. Every time I used the flashlight to look at the chart I lost my night vision and it would take me a few minutes to get it back. About 11 PM the temperature started dropping and the seeing improved, and the object was higher in the sky, so it became continuously visible without averted vision, but still extremely faint. I never would have noticed it unless I was looking for it and knew exactly where and when to look. I went to my 18mm eyepiece (33X) to increase the sky contrast, and that helped it stand out. By midnight, there was no doubt about it, a tiny speck of light, very slowly moving amongst the stars. I was following it pretty confidently now, so I risked using the Barlow (66X) but the extra magnification didn't help much.

Around midnight it was getting too cold to stay out, I really wasn't dressed for it, so I called it a night. It was just getting into the outer regions of the Beehive, when I shut it down.

A mountain-sized boulder, a planet-killer, three quarter of a million miles away. Wow.