Clear skies imaging time is valuable. make the most of your opportunites by good planning and targetting so that when seeing is good you are ready with the right imaging plan.
Understand what targets you can see from your site at the current time of year with the horizion and obstacles yoiu have. Choose potential targets and calculatre the size of target your equipment can image.
Your Site
There is nothing more frustrating or time wasting than deciding to image a target only to find thyat it is blocked by a tree or a neighbours garage roof . Create a view diagram or chart for South and North showing your available horizon and obstacles that obscure your view. This can be a simple hand drawn diagram; you can plot it a chart in Excel or even build a custom horizon for use in Stellarium using a mobile horizon logging app like Theodolite . The app allows you to log positions on yiour horizon and create a coordinate log file that can be used to build a horizon file for Stellarium.
Field of View (FOV)
The FOV of your equipment is a function of the sensor size and focal length, including any barlows or focal reducers. It is expresed in degrees and minutes. For example an Orion 8u0ED-APO telescope has a focal length of 500m, if attached to a ZWO ASI294 with a sensor size of 19×13 mm gives a FOV of 2.2° x 1.5°. Green in the diagram. A Canon DSLR with a 200mm lens gives a much wider FOV and a Celestron 8″ SCT with a focal reducer and a ZWO ASI294 cameras a much narrower one. use this calculator to find yours and compare it to the angular size of potential targets.
DSO target lists
A good starting point is one of the publications listed in the Books section.
Right Click on this image download a 20mb version of of these 100 top targets compiled by Gary Imm
Atk have published a good list of seasonal targets.
Galactic Hunters list targets for a DSLR and telephoto lens and links to another 60 telescope targets.
Select Targets
Use your site horizon data and equipment FOV to select targets for a 3 month period.
Remember to discount dates either side of the full moon.
Validate the targets using Planetarium Software to come up with a short list. It is then worth searching Astrobin for images of the target using equipment similar to yours to get ideas for framing.