Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to reply so far! Freeman I seem to recall as a frequent contributor to Sky&Tel a couple of decades back, Corder I remember from the old Deep Sky. Not surprising that the observers with the highest success rates are from the southwest US... observing conditions are so much better there and your winters are not nearly as cold as those in the US northeast, to say nothing of Canada and northern Europe! In Saskatchewan, overnight winter temperatures are typically anywhere from 30 to 60 degrees below freezing, so I very rarely take a telescope out between December 1st and March 1st... you'd have to be nuts to take a telescope out in those conditions. I do recall setting up my telescope once in Quebec when the overnight temperature was -34 Celsius (-29 Fahrenheit)... all for naught - despite being clear ice crystals were suspended in the air, causing havoc with the transparency.

Ivan - a great drawing of IC1613 and Kid Orion I envy your views of the Eridanus Cluster and Pal 13. Several years ago I moved to a small village in Sask to have a “deep sky” backyard. Conditions are fairly good when it's not winter, on the best nights I have mag. +6 skies, but multiple light sources nearby - including a local with a dusk-to-dawn mercury vapour light, means I never get properly dark adapted. So dwarf spheroidal galaxies, Terzan clusters, etc. etc... not for me. I'm sticking to the NGC/IC and the brighter MCG and UGC galaxies. Will be retiring 5 or 6 years down the road... if my health holds out I'd like to do more travelling for observing, Australia, US southwest, etc.

I'd appreciate hearing more from some of the younger observers on this site... nobody expects you guys to have 5000 or 10000 objects seen if you've only been at it a few years, but I'd love to know how you're doing.