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One thing that I would recommend Tom is to be careful about jumping in to the deep end too quickly. Prime focus astrophotography (connecting your camera directly to your telescope) can present a number of challenges which can be quite daunting at first. Conventional wisdom says that it is best to start with widefield work first and them move on to narrow field prime focus after gaining some experience.
An option that I would consider is to start off by buying a DSLR with a reasonable quality lens and to try some piggy back photography first. By this I mean to install the camera on the top of your OTA so you are capturing images directly with the DSLR using its own lens. You will find this far more forgiving than trying to debug the issues that will occur the first time trying prime focus. I am assuming that you have a reasonable quality tracking mount that will carry the payload of your OTA and a DSLR.
If you finish up buying a Canon DSLR, the Backyard EOS software is a great tool for automating image capture. For image calibration, stacking, integration and processing - the are a number of tools around including Deep Sky Stacker, Image Plus, Nebulosity and Pixinsight. For the learning process there are many many books availbe but I would start by simply doing a Google search using terms such as Astrophotography introduction or primer or something similar. There is plenty of stuff online that can absorb many hours of reading before making the first purchase.
I hope this helps as a starting point Tom and I wish you well on your journey.
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