Hi Steve
It is going to be a glorious star-gazing night. Dress up warm for later in the evening and have your mozzie repellant handy - use a roll-on and not a spray else you might spray onto eyepieces and mirrors - eeek!
Melbourne's sky glow is considerable, even if your local direct lighting is subdued. From Greensborough, you will be best looking North and East and happily there are things to see there. In your lowest magnification eyepiece (the 32mm or 26mm?) line up on the Pleiades (the Seven Sisters), an open star cluster that looks like a fuzzy patch in the sky. Then move to the bright orange star Aldebaran to see a huge orange star (it will just be a bright orange pin prick of light - all stars are too far away for us to see the disc of the star (except the Sun, of course)). Then swing across into Orion. You are looking for the Great Orion Nebula which is the fuzziness in the middle star of the sword (not the belt) - or the middle of the handle of the fryingpan, if you see it that way. Start with widefield, then try to push up to higher magnification and see some of the detail and the stars embedded in this huge glowing cloud of dust and gas.
To the west, the brightest object is Venus - you cannot miss it for an hour or two after sunset. Try that with your higher magnification eyepieces. You might find that you want to put the "moon" filter in place - it is bright. What do you see?
Then if you are quick after sunset, there is another bright dot down to the left and below Venus, but not as bright. Get the telescope onto that, both wide field and higher magnification - what do you see? This is Jupiter and its four main moons may be seen in a line (or sometimes they are in front of or behind the planet, sometimes all on one side).
Now, South may be very bright, but try to locate "47 Tuc", one of the most beautiful globular clusters in the sky. It will be fairly high to the west of south - check your map. It is beside the "Small Magellanic Cloud".
Go here:-
http://www.skymaps.com/downloads.html and download the Southern hemisphere, December edition - pdf usually is fine. That has a map and lots of targets with descriptions!
Let us know what you see!
