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Entry-Level Astronomy?
brobak writes "I'm getting ready to move into a new home on a couple of acres of rural property a significant distance from any large source of light pollution. I've always been interested in astronomy in general, and I would like to put my dark skies to use by picking up decent telescope and learning a bit about the skies over my head. The overall budget for this project is going to be around $1,000. I am particularly interested in astrophotography, but I understand that that may carry me outside the scope of the initial budget. I've already signed up for my local astronomy club's next monthly meeting. I have been doing Web research, but I thought that the Slashdot community would be the perfect place to get opinions on entry-level equipment, websites, and books."
I'm a moderately experienced amateur astronomer, and a professional astrophysicist. I have a nice TMB 105 apochromatic refractor, and I would never recommend one to a beginner. Good apo refractors have impeccable quality, but they are not cost-effective, unlike a halfway decent 10" Newtonian (which will cost 1/4 as much, yet give far superior views).
Aperture is king. Aperture wins. You can never get enough aperture
My advice is to forget about astrophotography for the moment. Do not get a DSLR camera -- you will want a dedicated astro-camera with a cooled CCD sensor. You will also want a good equatorial mount (Losmandy, Astro-physics, or similar) which will cost at least ~$2000. Deep-sky astrophotography is expensive and for the moment, you're better served with a good visual instrument to get you started. (If you just want to take images of the moon and planets, you can get by with a webcam and a lower cost equatorial mount.)
With a $1k budget, you won't be able to do deep-sky astrophotography. Given your budget, the economics of astro-imaging, and the difficulty of putting a large telescope on a quality equatorial mount, your best bet is to forego imaging until you can save a substantially larger amount of money. In the meantime, get yourself a 10" or larger Dobsonian-mounted Newtonian. They may look cheap, but you will appreciate the aperture when viewing deep-sky objects.
Oh, and join a local astronomy club if you can.