I am definitely in a light polluted area (downtown Chicago) so I figure only planets are worth a go locally.
I’d make an effort to go to dark sky parks and get some deep sky viewing in.
That said, I’d prefer any wow value while looking through the eyepiece (the woman’s gasp at 2:00 says it all) over needing to take many photos and process them to see something. Nothing wrong with the latter but ISTM there are loads of professional astronomers with equipment only a government can afford that get better pics than I ever could.
First of all, thank you for starting this thread. I have just started reading it, if I say something that has already been said please be forgiving. I am thinking of buying a telescope myself, I’ll bookmark this discussion and will read it again, probably several times. I think it will help me too. Now:
There is always the sun (admittedly a star, but a special one to us). We will need filters, but there is a lot going on there and you can see it during the daytime, when the rest of the universe is invisible to our instruments.
Here is a 'minimalist telescope setup:
That’s a Celestron C-90 (~$200), a ‘Star Adventurer’ portable tracking mount (~$450), on a Manfrotto photo tripod. This is will give you good views of the planets and moon, and will enable fairly short-exposure astrophotography. If all you are interested in is viewing, you don’t need the tracker and could just put the telescope on a ballhead on the tripod.
Here are some images you could expect to get in a city with this setup:
Saturn:
Jupiter:
Deep sky objects are difficult, but globular clusters are about as bright as deep sky objects get. Here’s M15 shot with the little Celestron C90:
That cluster would be visible through an eyepiece, but it would look like a gray smudge, pretty much.