I thought about making a thread about this as I recently got into it a bit. Been meaning to start a damn site about it too. It's a high $$$ niche and people spend a fortune on all sorts of upgrades and toys. I had my first scope like 10 years or so ago and had fun with that but also didn't know what I was really doing and sold it eventually. Just got back into it all recently as well as photography.
I will say if you want to get started get a go-to (you basically align it and it finds things for you) telescope so you don't have to dick around with searching for things. That can be fun on its own and you can learn about the sky and all that but nothing like pushing a button and seeing what you want. Trying to find things on your own can become very frustrating. Even aligning the scope can be a pain in the ass at times.
As far as scopes go the Celestron Nexstar SE series is a good place to start (for viewing, at least). I have the Nexstar 4SE. It's pretty small but it's a good starter scope. Generally speaking bigger aperture is almost always better but also don't forget portability. If you've got a 60 lbs behemoth scope you don't feel like ever dragging out then what's the point? Even binoculars can be fun in a dark sky site. Dark sky is key, light pollution can really kill any night sky experience.
Figure out what you want to accomplish with this hobby exactly before you go and start purchasing equipment. Do you want to look at deep sky objects like star clusters, galaxies, etc or do you want good views of the planets and moon? Do you want to do astrophotography? The different types of telescopes are best suited for certain tasks. I want to get into astrophotography and I quickly realized there's a pretty steep learning curve and it can get expensive pretty quickly (there's
always a bigger scope or better camera you can get, mounts, accessories, etc). I already want a second scope for wide field views and faster imaging. Ugh.
I learned all this stuff by just doing a
lot of reading. I might take a night time photography workshop that is coming up. Should be cool as I haven't really been out in really dark skies with the scope yet.
Here's some videos and images I've made. Keep in mind, with astrophotography, aside from the moon, taking an image is not the majority of the work. It's all about the processing and getting as much out of the image / video data as you can. So that's something to consider if that's something you want to get into and think it's just "point and shoot". There's a lot of things to learn. If you like the challenge and don't set your expectations too high then it's a lot of fun though! I haven't attempted any deep sky imaging yet. All these were taken with my Nexstar 4SE and Canon Rebel T3i, well except for the last 2, that's obviously done without the scope.
Here's the video of Saturn I made:
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=An2pC20uIMc]Saturn Through Nexstar 4SE Telescope - YouTube[/ame]
And here's the image I pulled out of that:
Some video of the moon I made and some gay webmaster music to go with it.
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7pRJ0IaueI]Moon with Celestron Nexstar 4SE and Canon Rebel T3i - May 17, 2013 - YouTube[/ame]
(In the below video you can see my scope doesn't have that wide of a field of view - something to consider when choosing a scope)
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rJ2XmRK8ZQ]Supermoon Through Nexstar 4SE Telescope - YouTube[/ame]
Here's a
hi-res of the first shot
Close-ups:
Not particularly space related but the sky nonetheless. Taken over Lake Ontario during last week's storm.
And let me finish off with another photo I took a few days ago which every gay webmaster can appreciate:
