Astrophotography and visual astronomy don't necessarily go together. A used DSLR with a short focal length lens can take nice wide angle short exposures with j

Astrophotography and visual astronomy don't necessarily go together. A used DSLR with a short focal length lens can take nice wide angle short exposures with just a tripod. That'll run you about $150. You can build a barn door tracker from hardware store parts that'll allow you to lengthen your exposures. You can get a nice telescope for visual use brand new for under $500. Lots of places sell Dobsonians that are pretty much ready to go out of the box. If you want to go for a more traditional mount + OTA (optical tube assembly), that gets more expensive. Used equipment is nice because amateurs tend to take care of their optics and after the initial depreciation, optics tend to hold their value. Check the Cloudy Nights classifieds section. (Actually, just check Cloudy Nights in general, lots of friendly, knowledgeable people there.) I put together my visual setup (127mm SkyWatcher Mak-Cass, heavy duty photo tripod, and a Stellarvue M-2 mount) for around $700 excluding the cost of eyepieces. The sky is the limit on eyepieces, but most EPs between $40 and $100 work just fine. I shopped used and watched for sales. What many people don't realize (including myself when I was starting out) is that you want to invest as much, or more than the cost of the OTA into your mounting solution if you want to get any enjoyment out of the hobby. Even if you're just doing visual work. Skimp on your foundation, and the whole setup will wobble all over the place, making it hard to see anything, and that's not fun or relaxing. It's putting visual and photography together that gets expensive. When you want to take long exposures at high magnification, you want a really solid equatorial mount with high-resolution encoders. Those start at $1000 on the low end. You'll probably want a better CCD to image with (a few hundred bucks). Then you can get into tracking scopes (even the expensive mounts accumulate error after a while). It's not really the main scope that's expensive, it's all the stuff you need to support it. Anyway, actually looking at your question, as long as you stay away from the low end stuff, Celestron and SkyWatcher both make fine OTAs. My recommendation is do not get an all-in-one package, especially under $400 unless it's a Dobsonian. The mount will be garbage. You can take short exposures with a DSLR + just about any OTA and EQ mount that will support the weight. (You won't probably won't get a flat field though). I'm pretty sure people also image with Celestron C8s or C10s which are relatively inexpensive. A lot of this is armchair observations, as I've managed to convince myself to stay solely on the visual side of amateur astronomy because it's easier and cheaper. There are enough amateurs with $20k rigs that you can enjoy their nice images of all the popular DSOs without putting in the blood, sweat, and tears.