Yellow dwarf

I’m in Cheshire, which has bortle 5 skies, though I think sometimes it can be more like bortle 4 on good nights.

I decided last night to do some Galaxy observing with my Celestron travel scope 70 (I have ordered an 8 inch dobsonian, but shipping times from China are huge🙁). I looked for the Leo Triplet, and managed to find them using averted vision. M66 was the most clear, followed by NCG3628. M65 was harder to see, even with averted vision. However, after a few minutes, it started to pop into visibility, which was amazing. After around 10 minutes of looking at the Leo triplet, I decided to hunt for a globular cluster, M53 in Coma Berenices. It was very easy to find, no averted vision needed. It looked like a faint grey blob, but the globular shape was fairly easy to make out. Finally, I went for M64, the black-eye Galaxy. It was there, hard to see, but again with averted vision I could make out that it was a Galaxy. Considering the atmosphere wasn’t very stable last night, I’m amazed that I managed to see all of these objects, and with such a small scope.(I also visited the regular binocular targets earlier in the evening, M45, M42 and M44 but I didn’t spend long on them). I’ve attached sketches of what the objects looked like through my scope.

Oh just to add on to my previous post I also saw Mars and Uranus when they were close together in January through the travel scope 70, so if an 8 inch dob is a significant upgrade I can’t wait to start using it.(Shame about the delays in shipping though.)

Thanks everyone for replying, great advice here. I’ll be very happy if it looks as good as it does in the thread linked above. For me it’s not just about observing these objects, it’s about knowing how far away they are, and how massive they can be, for me that just caps off the experience. I already own a Celestron travel scope 70, and Ive had good views of the Pleiades, Orion Nebula and Jupiter and Saturn when they were near each other in December, but I reached the limits of that scope fairly quickly. The 8 inch dob seemed like a reasonable upgrade, and I’m now very confident that it is.😀

I’ve just purchased an 8 inch dobsonian and I was wondering: a) is it a good choice? b) what can I realistically expect to see under bortle 5 skies