Howdy all; We had a mediocre night near Phoenix last night, by 9:30 or so the = clouds had moved in and we sat around and chatted for a short while and finally gave up. But, before all that happened, I did get a chance to do a few big open clusters and Collinder 471 in Cepheus was the most impressive of those. = It was not much in the 8X42 binoculars, just 4 stars and a difficult = background fuzziness. However, in the Orion 100mm f/6 RFT refractor and a 35mm Panoptic = eyepiece it was very nice. I counted 23 stars and called it bright, extremely = large and scattered. This grouping is 80% of the field of view in the 35 = Pan!! That is a BIG cluster. There is an interesting triple star on the = northern edge of the cluster. It was split even at this low power (18X) and = formed an almost equilateral triangle that attracted your eye right away. The other large grouping that I observed was Kemble's Cascade in Camelopardalis. It fits perfectly into the 35mm Panoptic on the 4 inch. = I saw it as a chain of 21 stars with the compact cluster NGC 1502 on the = SE end. The chain includes one star of about 5th magnitude and the rest = are 6, 7 and 8 mag. The bright star is light yellow and the rest are white. = This is truly a cascade of stars diagonally across the field of view. A memorable object. Clear Skies; Steve Coe =20 -- See message header for info on list archives or unsubscribing, and please send personal replies to the author, not the list.