Amateur Astronomy
Telescope Basics is a good starting point to learn about how telescopes work. Dark skies are good places to observe from (especially during a new moon)! Light pollution is not good and you may find yourself having to take a drive to find dark skies.
They say the best telescope is the one you are most willing to get out when you feel like going outside and observing. A 10 inch Dobsonian telescope is comparatively inexpensive for a telescope ("tele" means "long distance" & "scope" means "look" in Greek) and is what many consider the starting size of a dob to make out the "faint fuzzies" like galaxies. Globular Star Clusters are also more pronounced in larger scopes.
One thing to mention here is having an astronomers chair. Unless you want to stay in a bent position when you're viewing you may want to have a chair with variable heights. You can pay a lot of money for one or grab a few 1 x 6 inch pine wood boards and create an inexpensive LYBAR chair. Other equipment could be a sky atlas for locations of space objects within constellations or a Telrad finder for telescopes are favored with many stargazers as well. Some astronomy software comes with GOTO telescopes and there are other programs like Red Shift that can be helpful for navigating your way through the night sky. There is so much to learn that going to star parties, joining an astronomy club, and/or surfing on the Internet checking out forums and other websites can increase your knowledge and be interesting too! Checking out the "Cloud Forecast" may be helpful when you plan your night out observing.
Meteor Shower Calendar Magnification - 60x per inch Double Stars Observe List Deep Sky Obs Tipz
International Sidewalk Astronomy Night Celestial Events from Sky.org Observing when the moon is full
Skywatcher's Guide to the Moon Hawaii Cloudcam Afocal Astronomy Pics Observing Mag
Alaska Aurora Cam Canada's Auroramax Cam Live Aurora cams Distances-between-planets
Are Your Skies Clear or Cloudy? USA States Stats
William Herschel and M5 Moon Forecast Spaceweather.com Aurora Forecast
Aperture and focal length are important for choosing a telescope. But if you're starting out perhaps you may want to just use binoculars and take a while to learn constellations and bright (guiding) stars in your sky. It can be bad to drop a lot of money into equipment that you may not use because of time constraints or loss of interest. A good indicator of being hooked on looking at the skies is when you find yourself looking at the stars with nothing but your eyes and enjoying it. Knowing that around those stars there is most likely planets like Jupiter or rocky/icy worlds like our moons and the planet Earth. A Universe filled with variety and mysteries beyond our wildest imagination.
But the moon can be interesting to look at as well. This picture of the moon, actually two pictures at two different magnifications, was taken with a 5 inch Celestron 127 SLT telescope using a green filter on the eyepiece. The top image is at 150x magnification and the bottom is 300x with a close up of the bottom right side of the moon's crater (from the top image). I took the picture with my cell phone. A better setup would be to use a camera mount with a digital camera. Webcams which are good for planets used in combination with software like Registax is popular too. The picture to the right of the moon is the constellation Orion.
Taking pictures of the stars can be done with just a digital camera such as a 10 Megapixel CCD Canon Powershot which is what I used to take the 4 photos below. The pictures were taken using a 15 second shutter delay which is very important for photographing stars. For more flexibility gorillapod camera mounts are affordable and cool. The bottom right (of the 4 night sky shots picture) has the constellation Cassiopeia near the post and tilted on its side with its W shape.
John Dobson is a leading founder of Sidewalk Astronomers and is the inventor of the Dobsonian telescope. But his greatness does not end there...take a look into some of his ideas about cosmology. He also has a book "Beyond Space and Time" that may be worth looking into if you're interested in cosmology. And what is cosmology? It is about the entire Cosmos - what its nature is, how it relates to us and is part of us.