Sounds like a sensible approach Adrian. You can use just about anything to image the moon, I have seen good shots from a push to dob. Planets are also within the reach of most basic setups. When you progress to DSO's though you need to understand the complexities involved. Your mount must be accurate enough to hold a point of light on a few pixels for a reasonable amount of time if you are to get any really good results with lots of detail. My average exposure is about ten minutes due to light pollution but in a recent thread on the imaging board someone showed exposures of 60mins, it really depends on your sky and the brightness of the object itself. If you intend to go for DSO's you will need to consider the following.
1. A good accurate equatorial mount.
2. A good quality telescope.
3. Generally a field flattener/corrector of some sort.
4. An autoguider setup (camera with a guidescope or off axis guider).
5. A good quality highly sensitive camera.
6. About 6 million adaptors and fittings to connect it all together
.
7. A laptop with suitable software
8. Lots of patience and technical nouse.
9. Be prepared to read a lot, processing is not easy.
10. Did I say a good accurate equatorial mount?
The price you pay is up to you but generally about $2500 for a very basic setup through to $100000 + (dont laugh some members have that sort of investment in AP but their pics are also outstanding).
The cheapest suitable mounts (HEQ5 pro and EQ6 Pro) are made by synta and sold under the skywatcher brand. The price of these mounts will vary lots both second hand and new depending on dealer. I recently sold my HEQ5 pro for $500 but they generally fetch about $800 - 900. I just didn't have the space to keep it. The EQ6 usually goes for $1100+ second hand but can carry a bigger load. These mounts often need fine tuning to get them to the required standard but the raw materials are there. It is quite a big step up from there to the next rung of suitable mounts ($4000 + new) which is why the EQ5 and EQ6 are seen as such good value and really only the health of your bank account will stop you.
It is best to start with a fast scope (eg F6 and below) and a small 80mm apochromatic refractor is often the go as they can be bought quite cheaply both new and second hand and do not demand much from the mount. Most of these types of scopes need a field flattener to correct the field over larger chips e.g. a DSLR. There are lots of options here but it is better to buy ones that are purpose built for the scope (often by the
manufacturer). It is best to avoid fork mounts and slow scopes (F10 etc) with long focal lengths as these demand a highly accurate mount and will only bring you grief (it costs lots both finacially and mentally to do narrow field )
There are many options for autoguiding but most folks around here use the QHY 5 (~ $300) with either and off axis guider (will bring you to tears trying to get it right) or a cheap guide scope in the form of a small achromatic refractor or even a modified finderscope (50mm +). Of course you need all the brackets and adaptors to mount it all.
Camera is up to you but most folk begin with DSLR's and once the bug bites end up spending thousands on purpose built peltier cooled astro cameras. These can be one shot colour or monochrome which need filters to create a colour image (even more expense). They range greatly in price from one or two thousand through to stupidly ridiculous.
Technical abilty is pretty much a given requirement as things always go wrong and you need to be able to fix it as is computing nouse. Constructing a pretty picture is not easy.
You can of course source most of this stuff second hand which will reduce the cost somewhat. Keep an eye on the classifieds board.
Hope this helps
Mark
Im Adrian aka darth_draconis, i hate introducing myself, i always have trouble describing myself 
so ill get ask my question and hopefully over time you can get to know me. I am looking into taking up astrophotography as a new hobby. The only thing I have at this stage is the camera, which is a Pentax SLR, so i would like some ideas on what i should look at buying for a beginners setup.
