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Billi,
Do you have a pair of binoculars? A pair of 10x50 is ideal for scanning the night sky. If so, next time you head out into the backyard with your telescope, take your binoculars and start scanning the southern sky; in particular, the swathe of the Milky Way - it's FULL of nebulae and clusters! At first, you might mistake them for faint wispy clouds, but as your eyes adapt to the dark, you'll start to pick out detail. Then swing your telescope to an interesting patch of sky and start exploring at higher magnification.
A lot of the more famous brighter nebulae span several degrees, and can't be fully captured in the limited field of view of a telescope. For example, Eta Carinae is about two degrees across, the Running Chicken is about 1 degree, the Small Magellanic Cloud spans about 5 degrees, and the Large Magellanic Cloud is a whopping 10 degrees!
It's quite easy to miss them when you're pointing your telescope right at them, because they span across the entire field of view. The only way to see the whole nebula at once is in a low-power wide-angle instrument, such as a pair of binoculars.
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