Welcome to the UHH Astrophotography Section!
I am far from any kind of 'Expertise', but I am pretty fresh from the "I wanna do Astrophotography" end of things.
First, I got hooked by Orion's Nebula, and maybe that has affected my desire to hunt Nebulae, as opposed to other deep sky objects.
So I started off looking for ways to take pictures, of deep space objects, and Nebula specific.
I like things kind of specific and simple. As I 'mined down' I found myself going from a
6" Celestron, which I soon realized was not really an Astrophotography telescope, through several other options. Save you from to boring a rendition, I had 3 wish lists I was grooming as I studied and refined where I was hoping to land.
I knew it was going to be costly, but I did not want to bounce my way up the learning curve. I wanted to get "the right stuff", then pull myself up to where I could use it.
Some things I've learned, Nobody has ever said, "That picture was taken with too good of a telescope."
So my desire for DSO's took me to Extra low Dispersion (ED), and Apochromatic lenses (APO), and other words of a foreign languish to me.
Reflector telescopes, to me, were with too much room for errors to come into the light streams. One of my lists did have an 8" Astrograph Newtonian Reflector on it, and I'd say it came in in second place, but lost to the refractor because of simplicity.
So I shied away from them. Call me Galilean, I just like a spyglass.
So I decided on glass, the best for my budget; and the CF tube (Carbon Fiber) for it's temperature focusing stability.
Then there was the host of other necessities to bring it all together.
My budget tight, I believe I still about tripled your desired ceiling. And it has taken me nearly a year to finally begin to bring myself up to the capabilities of the equipment.
But I'm glad I did it my way. (Me, and Sinatra...) :lol:
My advise? Figure out what you want to do, to view. Then begin building your list to that end.
Once you start building, you can see what it is going to take.
Bear in mind that there are a ton of "other things" you will want/need. Not the least of which is Light Pollution filtering for your location.