Hi Paul, there are two distinct trends in your post. One is astro-photography and the other one is observing but I feel you're getting the astrophoto bug.
You don't need a scope to take good pictures of deepssky objects in the night sky. You need a good mount.
You don't need a mount to start observing. You need a decent size DOB.
So you need to figure out what you want to do first as this hobby can get pretty hairy on the wallet side of things so a bit of research can save you a lot of "back and forth" buying.
