Heya
I'm only very new to this forum too, I've recently borrowed a friends 60mm wobblemaster refractor and had no trouble seeing orion nebula last night with the full moon and the light polluted skies of St Kilda.
I was looking through a 4mm (175x magnification) eye piece, which I am sure is as cheap as you can get, but there was definitely something there. What did it look like? Well, there was a couple of faint 'star like' points and an even feinter glowy smudge around them.
Looking directly at it there wasn't any kind of detail that I could see but nudging the scope and causing the object to jiggle around the eyepiece seemed to make it a lot more visible, I'm guessing because of the centre of vision being not as sensitive to light, like described in the post above.
What you do is point the telescope at a part of the sky and move it around to appreciate just how 'empty' large portions of the sky are, when you look around you can spend a long time looking at literally NOTHING! So then when you DO come across something you definitely know you aren't just seeing an "average" bit of the sky.
Another thing I found which I thought looked really cool was the open clusters near the constellation of corina, there are several, and a bright nebula (but I don't quite know if I could see that with the equipment I have at my current disposal) it's roughly between the southern cross and the false cross, now there's a piece of sky that's NOT average!
