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They look like small moving stars, and can be easily distinguished form airplanes by the lack of any blinking lights, and their speed (and surprisingly brightness in some cases) in the night sky.
I live in the NYC area, next to a large airport and several big cities, and a big school stadium that'll light up the sky when the lights are on, and can still see them zooming by overhead.
(And you can install the ISS Detector app to get notified when the ISS and the Tiangong are going to be visible overhead in your area.)
I'm not very knowledgeable about the night sky, but I've loved looking up all my life.
Just naming a few objects, like pointing out planets, can be enough to get people talking about their own experiences and curiosity.
One of those tools is a Bahtinov Mask, which I’ve never heard of, but I’m going to 3d print one from this site and use it to try and focus my scope.
I had two plain star charts as well, one for the northern hemisphere, which I used constantly, and one for the southern hemisphere, which I rarely needed. But plain star charts cannot show where the planets would be from month to month. So I relied heavily on the monthly charts published by the newspapers. Retrograde planetary motions were hard to estimate manually unless you were an expert. At the age of 10, I wasn't an expert. So the monthly charts were very useful to me.
When my father switched to a different newspaper, I was flabbergasted to discover that our new paper did not publish sky charts. What an outrageous omission! So I promptly wrote a letter to the editor about it and posted it. A month later, the newspaper published my letter in the 'Letters to the Editor' column. Since it was a national paper, I was beaming with joy at the thought that people across the country would read my complaint. Another month later, the paper began publishing sky charts.
These days we can take a mobile phone app and point it at the sky but there is a certain joy in simply exploring the night sky with minimal assistance, appreciating the beauty and mysteries of the universe and pondering philosophical questions like why we are here and why any of this exists. I do not want to sound like a lunatic (and if I do, I suppose I do not mind) but I think it is one of the most immersive experiences a human being can have with the universe.
As a bonus, it can be quite useful to impress your girlfriend too, provided she is of a certain kind. I remember when I met mine about a decade ago, we would sometimes be stuck at traffic lights and I would start calling out objects in the night sky. "That's Jupiter up there. That's Betelgeuse, the red giant star that could go supernova one day. That's Rigel, one of my favourite stars. And there are the Pleiades, one of the most photogenic star clusters. If you draw an imaginary line through the three stars of Orion's Belt and extend it eastward, you reach Sirius, the brightest star." And so on. Within a few weeks, she started joining in, and we would try to name as many objects as possible before the lights turned green again. Fortunately, she found all this entertaining rather than seeing it as evidence of complete derangement, and we are now married.