For numerous reasons I haven't had a chance to do some peaceful observing at home here under decent conditions for some weeks, so tonight with a clean looking sky I decided this was the night.
Seeing is reasonable, better than I've seen here in my suburban environement for a while, no clouds for days so the air is pretty dry. Downside - a monstrous amount of moon glow filling the sky, however I decided to ignore that as much as possible and push on past.
I'd set up my scope a couple of hours in advance with primary cooling fan running so everything was as ready as possible. When I started observing the moon was not far past it's high point for the evening so I had decided initially to focus on some open clusters and globs as they are usually not quite so corrupted by moonglow. I started with the SMC area: 47Tuc of course, still looking great if a little "faded" against the very "grey" looking background visible through my eyepiece. Spent some time around the SMC observing everything I could see (NGC 362 glob, etc) and after a while I moved on to the area in and around the LMC as it rotated up and out from behind some palm trees.
Considering the conditions I spent quite some time within the LMC - more than I have spent here in ages actually, mostly using an 8mm ep and staying on each target area for some time to try and soak up as much detail as possible. I was surprised at how good the seeing actually was tonight, not perfect but much better than I had anticipated, it was just such a shame the moon was there!
I decided to push my luck, moving north through the sky and locating the lovely wide Sculptor Galaxy NGC 253 galaxy with the 2 distinctive bright indicator stars so close, the broad "cloud" of the galaxy clearly discernible even in my 30mm ep. From there I tried hopping around to nearby objects such as galaxy NGC247 and glob NGC288. Tricky hopping with a dob as these were all pretty much near the zenith for me at this time, in fact too tricky as I gave up before finding planetary nebula NGC246 - next time perhaps.
By now Orion had risen nicely above the house behind my yard, the Pleaides cluster was rising above the trees, etc, so I quickly repositioned the scope across the yard a bit to improve my viewing angle (the beauty of a dob, no polar alignment to stuff up by moving the scope around as you please) and I proceeded to spend time with what is my favourite part of the sky. I studied the Orion nebula area at length, getting a good clean view of the Trapezium in the heart of M42 and surprised to find that even with moon burn developing on my skin I could still make out the 5th and 6th stars in the Trapezium. They were wavering slightly but definitely visible there, and their brightness was well above the limiting magnitude of viewing tonight. I spent ages wandering around in Orion before seeking out Sirius to see just how magnificent that massive nuclear furnace was shining tonight. I also spent a litle time observing the nearby M41 cluster - pretty, though a nice carbon star or 2 would make it SO much nicer!
After a comparitively brief viewing of the Hyades area (Aldebaran looking quite clean) I roamed across to the Pleaides - dropped back to my 30mm UW angle ep to get better views, and in fact eventually I ended up just grabbing my handy little 10x32 binos out and my evening turned into a bino hunt around the eastern regions of the sky, as far away from the steadily descending moon as possible. I was even rewarded with a couple of meteors for my effort - not spectacular, but appreciated anyway.
I guess the motto of the story is that even with a fairly bright moon there ARE still things you can observe apart from the moon itself, it needs only the will to succeed!
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You can bet your bottom dollar that if you have been experiencing poor viewing whether from cloud or seeing or work 
that everything will become better and better the fuller the moon gets 
