I went to a "Star Party" as part of an astronomy class I took in college. The college, which was in a semi-rural area at the time, turned off all the lights on the football field, making it very dark, and local amateur astronomers brought their telescopes and set them up.
I was impressed by the fact that I could actually see all those moons around Jupiter, plus the rings of Saturn. There was still too much light pollution to really see a lot of the stars, and one of the astronomers told me that there wasn't much point in looking at Venus through the telescope, because it still looked like a star.
There's an observatory at Mt. Palomar, near San Diego. My dad took me there a couple of times when I was a teenager. It's only open during daylight hours, so we just saw photos.
A friend and I went to Griffith Park in L.A. once, and we wanted to see the observatory, but it was closed that day, so we went hiking instead. (We saw another kind of star on the trail.) Ordinarily, Griffith Observatory stays open until 10 PM, so you can actually use the public telescopes to see things (especially in the winter, when the sun sets early).
