I got out for two observing sessions over the last few days.
Thursday
On Thursday evening, I took advantage of the early darkness of winter to get a short session in and still get home for a reasonable night's sleep. I set up at a pullout off the Mauna Loa Access Road at about 7,350 ft. elevation with my SVX152 on the AZ-100 mount. I spent the evening working through lists of deep sky objects in Taurus and Orion.
In Taurus most of the initial objects on the list were part of the nebulosity surrounding the Pleaides. All of which I'd seen before of course, but never bothered to identify by the individual catalog designations. One surprise from the Taurus list was the planetary nebula NGC 1514. It's a large planetary, so big that it was easily visible in the low power of a 21mm Ethos eyepiece (57x magnification, 1.75 degree FoV). The central star was apparent and a UHC filter slightly improved the contrast. Though there was little detail in the nebula at higher power with an 8mm Ethos eyepiece (150x magnification, 0.66 degree FoV). Later, a search for Struve's Lost Nebula and Hind's Variable Nebula around T Tauri yielded no detection of either nebula. I later moved on to Orion hitting all the well known objects there and cruising through some lesser known ones as well.
Saturday
While Thursday night was quiet and simple, Saturday night was dramatic. The forecast was good, but driving up the Mauna Loa Access Road, I was in clouds and fog all the way to the parking lot at the end of the paved road at 11,000 feet. There were clouds there, but I could see that they did not go much higher and I could see clear skies above them. Since clouds tend to drop at sunset, I waited. After sunset, the clouds were promising, but not yet clear enough to pull out the telescope and start observing. Furthermore, there were flashes of lightning in some high clouds to the North on the other side of Maunakea. I pulled up satellite images on my phone and could see a cell of clouds peeling off of a weather system that was passing to the northeast. The cell split off and moved southwest through the channel between the Big Island and Maui. That's what was generating the lightning.
By this time, I'd been joined by two fellow observers and the low clouds dropped as expected, so we set up and the lightning stayed off to the North and West. This backdrop of constant flashed of lightning and the occasional faint roll of thunder made for a dramatic night of observing.
Conditions were otherwise excellent, the clouds stayed low on the northern horizon and the winds were very light (<5 MPH). It was, however, quite cold. Observing at this higher elevation means the temperature was 32 F (0 C) and the humidity never really dropped. When combined with a light breeze, this really drew the heat out of you.
I spent the evening starting to march through a list of DSOs in Eridanus. This is an extensive list due to Eridanus's large size, so I did not finish tonight. I was also distracted by the light show to the North and West, I spent quite a bit of time naked eye observing the sky and watching the lightning which would occasionally be bright enough to damage dark adaption.
The lightning show was reminiscent of the time about 6 or 7 years ago when I'd given an evening talk outdoors at the Stellarvue Dark Sky Star Party in California and had a distant summer lightning storm as a backdrop for my talk as it got dark.
I really regret not bringing my camera and tripod this night. The naked eye view of the Andromeda Galaxy setting in to a bank of clouds lit up from inside by lightning was amazing and a time lapse of that would have been stunning.