[andrewk_82 (Andrew)]

I received a 10" GSO Dob for my birthday a couple of days ago. Last night I took it out for a look. I've seen pictures of NGC 1365 in Fornax before and was quite keen to see it through my new scope. I eventually found it, but it really wasn't what I was expecting. It just appeared as a fuzzy patch with not really much detail. With averted vision I could just make out the spiral arms. The astronomy book I have says that it is around magnitude 9, so I figured that given the apparent 14+ magnitude capability of my scope, it should stand out like dogs balls.The sky was fairly dark as I live in a rural area (I can clearly see the milky way, and andromeda galaxy with naked eye), although I do live in town with a street light across the road and the neighbours kitchen lights on.

My questions are, am I expecting too much from my scope, or should my scope be able to see much more? The EP I was using was the 25mm GSO SP that came with the scope. Would a better EP enable me to see galaxies more clearly?
I think the scope is reasonably well collimated, as when I do a star test the star forms a perfect circle when defocused, but stars do seem to have a slight tail (look like mini comets) when properly focused. Is this from the EP or something else?
I did leave the scope out for 2 hrs to cool down before I used it. Focus was quite good to start with, but after an hr or so stars would not focus properly. I did notice though that the temp did drop quite quickly before this happened, could this be the cause of the poor focus?
Sorry to ask so many questions but I'm new to this and any help would be grealty appreciated.
Cheers