I thought it might help to reinforce the comments made by the regular forum contributors, from a complete newbie's perspective.
I'm actually a "proxy" for my Dad, who bought a Meade 8" LX-90 ACF a couple of months ago - a bit bigger than your scope, but comparable in build and performance etc. Weather in Brisbane has been pretty awful for sky viewing since he bought it, but we had our first good night last night. (Well as good as can be expected in suburban Brisbane, with glare from the City, sodium street lights, neighbour's units, etc.)
I arrived at his place at 7:30, set-up the scope, and our first target was Jupiter. It looked good in the standard Meade 26 mm eyepiece (sharp disk, clear bands, 3 moons clearly visible), but was bigger but markedly fuzzier with his higher power eyepieces. (He got a set of Orion eyepieces:
http://sirius-optics.com/shop/index....roducts_id=192).
We weren't sure whether it was poor technique / collimation (definitely a possibility for newbies like us!), 2nd rate eyepieces, or what, but we put the 26 mm Meade back in, and hunted down a few more targets, tinkered with attaching a camera, etc. (Off-topic, but the Bahtinov focussing mask that I cut from a sheet of cardboard worked a treat! And the Go-To mount worked beautifully, too - dial up a target, and Bingo! Right on target! Compared to our last experience with a manual 4 1/2" Newtonian scope many years ago, this almost seems like cheating!)
At about 10:30, I was just about to pack up for the night, and we finished by going back to Jupiter. (The main aim was to see just how good the Go-To alignment worked after a few hours of scanning around the heavens. It was perfect - dead centre!) Even though Jupiter was by now significantly lower in the sky, and had moved further into the light haze from the CBD, it was noticeably sharper than before. We popped the Orion 10 mm and 7.5 mm eyepieces in, and the higher magnification image was MUCH sharper than before.
I can only assume that the main differentiator was that the scope had reached thermal equilibrium and was therefore performing better; and I guess the whole atmosphere is typically more stable a bit later at night, because if anything, the light haze and height in the sky were worse for the second viewing than the first. (I'm sure that this not news for the regular star-gazers, but it was stunningly apparent to this pair of newbies!)
Our learning is that we will set up the scope outside as early as possible in future, and try to plan our night's viewing such that we will try to choose the ones of greatest interest for later in the session. (Although of course, if they're visible early, and it looks like there may be a chance of clouding over, we'll probably still start with them, and have a second go later, if the opportunity still remains!)