Hey Cogglepin,
The first and most important thing to remember about amateur astronomy is that unless you have access to the Hubble or James Webb, you won’t be seeing anything like the above pictures through the eyepiece of a back garden telescope. Our eyes aren’t as sensitive as camera sensors. Colourful nebula are faint grey smudges, galaxies are faint blurry blobs. If you have dark enough skies to show them at all.
There’s still wonder and joy when you look at a blurry blob, knowing that it’s 12 million light years away and realise that the photons that are currently hitting your eyes left that galaxy when our ancestors were some form of lemur though!
I started with a Skywatcher 200p Dobsonian telescope. It’s a fabulous instrument for learning to self navigate the night sky and for picking up as much light as possible. You’ll get one within your budget. It’s primarily a visual instrument though. Not much good for astrophotography.
I’d also recommend getting a copy of ‘Turn Left at Orion’ by Guy Consolmagno. It’s a great book for just learning about the night sky, but also gives a good perspective on what you’ll actually see through the eyepiece of different sizes of telescope.
Finally, I’m thinking of dipping my toes into a bit of astrophotography and I’m increasingly drawn to the new ranges of smart scopes that are coming out. The Zwo Seestar C30 or C50 are both in your price range. These aren’t traditional telescope for looking through. They connect to an app on your phone. Then find the target that you select from a database and begin gathering light and processing the data. Eventually giving a fairly high quality astro image.
Good luck!
