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Hi Hayley and welcome to IIS,
You have been given some excellent advice thus far. Get along to a club or public night and have a look through some different scopes and ask peoples' opinions.
Let me repeat some comments I made in a post a couple of months ago in response to a very similar scenario.
"Some of these cheaper scopes have poor optics, poor finderscopes and even poorer mounts. You will find them to be nothing more than an exercise in frustration. You will not be able to find very much, when you do find something you won't see very much and what you see will not stay in the FOV very long and you will then spend the next 30 mins trying to re center the target. After 2 weeks of frustration the telescope will spend the next 2 years unloved in the corner of the closet, the loungeroom or the garage. Avoid any telescope sold by any store other than a store that specialises in astronomical telescopes. Avoid stores like Dick Smith Electronics, Australian Geographic and Camera stores. These stores carry a very small range of astronomical telescopes and what they do carry is nothing more than junk, in most cases. Experienced people call these XTT's. Short for XMAS TRASH TELESCOPE's. Further, the people who work in these stores might sound like they know what they are talking about when talking to someone who is a beginner, but truth is 99% of the people working in these stores don't know one end of a telescope from the other themselves. Some of these small cheaper scopes are very difficult for an experienced person to use, let alone a beginner.
If you can stretch the budget a little further I would recommend a 6"/F8 dobsonian which you can buy from Andrews Comms for about $350. A scope like this will show you 500X more than some of these other "toy" telescopes and most importantly will be infinitely easier for you to operate and find things in. You want to foster your interest in the hobby, not leave it out of frustration after a short time period."
Cheers,
John B
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