Good to see so many involved in such a great hobby as astronomy! It's good to see so many with scopes, but even if you have a decent pair of binoculars and some darkish skies, you can really enjoy the night sky.
The Horsehead nebula image I showed was taken with some pretty serious amateur equipment...if you think a brewery system is expensive, just try to get involved in world-class astroimaging! For that image, I used a 12.5" RCOS Ritchey-Chretien scope on a Software Bisque Paramount ME. I used an SBIG dual-chipped, cooled STL-11000m astronomical CCD camera using clear, red, green and blue filters for a total exposure time of over 5 1/2 hours.
Of course, you don't really need such gear to take decent images, and even terrific planets and lunar images can be captured with an ordinary webcam, a very modest telescope, and a piece of freeware called Registax. I'd encourage you to give it a try.
But even if you don't care to do imaging, a telescope can really show some neat things. Just make sure it's mounted well (good advice Klainmeister) and you have good collimation...and dark skies always help (though planets and moon don't really need dark skies).
As for imaging, it's ALL about the mount, though shorter focal lengths can make it MUCH easier (it's still tough doing long exposure, deep sky imaging). The RCOS scope I mentioned above is 2857mm focal length, which is like a DSLR with a 2857mm telephoto lense at f/9. But for wide-fields and more relaxed images, here is an example of an image, the "North American and Pelican Nebulae," taken through a 4" apochromatic refractor, a Takahashi FSQ-106, at 530mm focal length. It's just under 5 hours exposure time. Hope you enjoy!
jay
www.allaboutastro.com
(damn job, house, wife and kids. 
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