That is very kind of you kalon! Will DM you.
So last week, I 'discovered' a few things.
Public parks are not the best place for observing because even the small ones has public toilet buildings with lights that are on all night ( or at 11pm at least ) which makes some of the bortle 5 skies within 25mins of me as good as staying home. So I ended up parking outside of a sports place in north eppings and dollying the telescope into the carpark. Took me another hour or so this time to settle on a spot, lots of time wasted but by 12ish i was aligned and ready to go.
Bortle 5 skies is ... somewhat better than bortle 8. This is going off
https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/ for the relative locations (Atlas 2015 data) but I tested it out at home on my roof and I could _still_ see all the objects that I could see driving out alone by myself in the dark... ( wife kept ringing me to see if I was ok )
Binoculars are really really cool!!! Most of the night, I actually spent lying down on the carpark aligned NS and panning the binoculars left to right. I started with orion and tracked my way past the running chicken, southern pleiades, then the pleiades would make a triangle with miaplacidus and aspidiske with vathorz in the middle. Aspidiske forms a larger "crux" with avior in the bottom and the omicron cluster to the right. Auhail and ahadi forms a Y shape with canopus at the bottom, Ahadi is very distinguishable by the 3 stars nearby and from there I pan to sirius and down to orion. On the other side of crux, I mapped out centaurus and by that time was such a _pro_ at the binoculars I could point to omega centauri. Lo and behold my surprise when I could see it with the binoculars!!! Better yet, somehow it looked better with the binos than with the telescope!
I stayed around to see antares the ax handle, scorpio, libra rise and mars just below that and finally jupiter and it's moons again. The moons actually orbit quite far from jupiter! Just going by the eye, it seems as if the furthest moon that was visible orbits at 5x jupiter's diameter away. All 4 visible moons were on one side this time instead of two on each side.
Packed up and went home happy and excited for being 4am in the morning... traffic was great!
There were only two almost encounters, one early on when a sports car came into the carpark and stayed for a while, I don't think they saw me over their bright headlights or heard me over their really loud mufflers, was relieved when they went. Then a service truck came around 4am, it would have been easy to see me in the bright night sky if these drivers were not blinded by their own headlights methinks.
EDIT: Of course I went back and forth with the gem/jewel clusters several times ( much easier with the binoculars when I can navigate ) and stared in wonder at eta carina and it's surroundings.
It was also fun just to point to random dark spots in the sky and see stars and other objects then try to identify what they were with sky safari