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.