Last night [12 March 2001] was great. For the first time I was able to find things other than the Planets, Pleiades, and M42. Saturday I picked up a copy of Turn Left at Orion. Last night I was able to put it to use. I'm still not quite sure how to describe the seeing so I'll skip that. I started out last night with M42 just because I like it. I was able to pick out 5 stars in the Trapezium, and I have only been able to do that once before.
I next moved over to Mizar, this was interesting because I just found out that each component of this double is binary itself. After that I thought I would try M51...WAHOO!! (out loud last night also) It took me about 30 min. to find it and even then it was very faint with no hint of the spiral structure (observing with a C8) but that didn't matter. Finding that galaxy was like riding a bike for the first time. By this time the moon was getting ready to come up over the mountain, so I moved over to Leo to try for M65/66. I was a little more successful this time, it only took me about 10 minutes to find and another WAHOO to find them, still faint and no sign of NGC 3628 but it was no less exciting than finding M51.
After that the moon was up and a few clouds moved in so I gave up and went in to spend the night dreaming about faint fuzzy's. I can't wait to get to dark skies to get a better look at these things.