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Well done to you and your son. As Richard mentioned, for $1200 your best bet for visual is probably an 8"-10" dob. This won't be motorised, but with a DSLR camera you may be able to take some quick exposure photos. It will certainly provide great deep sky views and be a good learning curve for him to build up his knowledge of the night sky in conjunction with an astronomy app like stellarium or skysafari.
From experience, I would say that after having a non-GOTO scope for a while, he might start to hanker for something a little more hi-tech with GOTO, which will open up a lot more of the sky for him, as well as providing tracking, which is a big bonus, although it still won't be ideal for long exposure photography. I'm not a photography aficionado, but from the little I know, you'd probably need a fair bit more than $1200 to get a decent equatorial mount and scope setup to allow for long exposure deep sky photography. Best of luck.
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