One of the things I recommend to newbies is to avoid looking at the super detailed, super artificially colored pictures and go to "Turn Left at Orion" for realistic representations of what they will see.
I am into this for a year and having a grand time. For me the WOW factor is not how pretty it is but that I can see it at all. My sky is very light polluted. Whole sections of the sky are blank to the naked eye. And yet, with the telescopes I can see things that are millions of trillions of miles away.
The Milky way is a rumor I have heard but never seen.
Sometimes I run a calculation in my head about distance. If this thing is 100 light years away and each light year is 5.8 trillion miles, that is 580 trillion miles, and I can see it.
At 200X it now looks like it is ONLY 290 trillion miles away.
Mars is roughly 50 million miles away right now. At 200X it looks like it is 2.5 million miles away. Maybe that's why I can't see a lot of surface detail.
The Moon is 250,000 miles away. At 300X it looks like it is 833 miles away. Could I see a car or a flag at 833 miles?
Guess that is why I can't see the lunar rover the Apollo teams left behind.
But when I look off into that blank sky with binoculars or a telescope and discover amazing things, that is exciting. GoTo and PushTo computer assist has been a great help in this respect as there is not a lot for me to align on with a Telrad or a red dot finder.