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David, I hate to spoil your day, but bigger isn't necessarily better for Astrophotography and you don't really have the right equipment. Moon and sun are no real problem, it's when your exposures need to be longer than a few seconds that the problems start.
It sounds like you have a standard Meade Alt Az mount, to do any serious AP you first need an Equatorial mount or if you are prepared to endure a lot of frustration you can mount your Meade on an equatorial wedge. Only when your OTA of choice is tracking equatorially can you even start to think of guiding, plus serious AP with a focal length around the same as your Meade requires extreme accuracy, think thousands of dollars not hundreds.
If you look at the highest quality images on this forum, you'll likely find that the equipment value would buy you a luxury car maybe even a small house.
Your best bet if you have reasonable lenses (read fast=expensive) for your Nikon would be to buy a Vixen Polarie or the Ioptron equivalent, that would allow you to do reasonable tracked widefield images.
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