M37 and M78

The seeing was pretty good tonight, about as good as it gets in this light polluted area. It was clear, cool, no wind, so I hauled the 8" Orion Dob outside and took a look. First off was Polaris, the north star. I usually can't see it but it was visible this evening and I pointed the scope at it just to make sure it didn't move. It didn't after about a half hour of setting up and checking every now and then. There were about 9 other stars visible in the 25mm eyepiece including mag 9.8 TYC 4628. Most of them, like TYC 4628-00081-1 were in the mag 8-9 range.
After that, I looked for M81 without luck. Too much light. Next I went to Mars and looked for M36, M37, and M38. Found M37 eventually but didn't see the other two. This open cluster was pretty dim and the other two are smaller I think. The last for the evening was M78 in Orion. I missed it the other night when looking at Orion but found it tonight. At first I was using the wrong belt star to star hop on. When I used the correct one, the dim nebulosity of M78 popped into view. I wasn't able to make out the other two nearby objects but M78 at least looked like it's picture. There was an asterism of 9 stars just to the south of M78 including TYC4768-00553-1 at mag 9.96 that matched the star chart.
While I was at it, I marked the altitude of Polaris on the dob's base. It'll be interesting to see if that matches our latitude here!