[sjackso]

Lots of good suggestions in this thread.

If you have a pair of binoculars already, get some kind of tripod for them, or improvise something with a reclining lawn chair -- anything that can stabilize the binos and let you point them upwards comfortably. It's surprising how much you can see with medium-quality binocular if you can keep them rock-steady.

A six or eight inch Dobsonian telescope is a good next step. The entry-level models are cheaper than they look, and the optical reach greatly exceeds that of cheap department-store refractors. Last I checked, pandemic reality had made them hard to find new, but they occasionally go for a song on Craigslist.

Look up a forum called Cloudy Nights for much, much more info.

[FPGAhacker]

On the stability point, walking/hiking sticks work well as a monopod. Some commercial sticks have threading to mount a camera.

I used one similar to this on my honeymoon: https://www.rei.com/product/155737/mountainsmith-trekker-fx-...