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Some personal comments on viewing...
The sky at night is one of nature's most beautiful sights, but if - like me - you have spent most of your life in a town or city you will have been robbed of much of this splendour. On a clear dark sky our unaided eyes can see objects down to magnitude 6 but most suburban skies show only stars brighter than about magnitude 4. (In the entire sky - both hemispheres - there are around 7000 stars brighter than magnitude 6 but less than 600 brighter than magnitude 4).
However, the robber didn't take everything - he overlooked many precious gems such as The Pleiades (M45), the Orion Nebula (M42) and The Beehive Cluster (M44) - all of which, given a pair of binoculars or a small telescope, make a wonderful sight even from our light polluted skies.
Of course, depending upon where you live, some of the Messier objects listed on this site may not even be visible at all - or may be too close to the horizon. As an example, those wonderful showpieces in Scorpius (M6 and M7) are almost impossible to observe from my home in the UK because they are never more than a degree or two above the horizon - nevertheless they are listed as very easy because, given a suitable latitiude (eg southern USA), they would almost certainly be in every observer's top ten.
When and where to look:
The ideal time to view an object is when the sky is at its darkest and the object is as high as possible above the horizon. This state of affairs happens (for observers in the northern hemisphere) when the object is due south around midnight
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