Where do you live/plan to use this? Light pollution can be a pain if you are in a big city and might see me tailor something for you (this would be related to the Limiting Stellar Magnitude thing you might have seen in specs lists).
"and maybe planets"
At times you can see some of them with the naked eye; they look like bright stars.
Anyway step one is get a copy of
http://www.stellarium.org/ , set it up for where you are and go out with a set of half nice binoculars* and a compass**. If you want to do full on sighting compass or sextant then by all means but a basic compass will do and if you have to figure out where you are by other patterns then even better.
You might as well also have
https://in-the-sky.org/satmap.php as satellites are also fun to look for.
Note where things are, try to predict where they will be at some point in the future and confirm that, look up what you see and what is known about it. All good fun and can be started without paying much of anything.
*I usually find you can pick them up at flea markets and yard sales for next to nothing.
**if your phone or GPS has such a thing then it will do for now.
What features are you after? I ask this having read your post as well -- we can talk about all kinds of tolerances, resolutions and more but this is purely from what you have seen then what do you think you want. For instance it is better than it was but considering it is no more than a cheap webcam sensor stuffed in a tube the option to have a computer out feature still seems to attract a bigger price bump than I might like. It seems the fancy overpriced feature right now is for computerised telescopes -- I can buy a motorised security camera that is mechanically not a lot different for not all that much but sticking that on a telescope apparently sees prices rise.
After this we do get to discuss refractive (classic stack of lenses) or reflective (uses a mirror and easier to get higher resolution from, possibly also a wider field of view) and may come at a slightly higher price. Things like equatorial or azimuthal mounts you can ignore -- much like you can measure things in imperial or metric you can also orient yourself using different methods. There are advantages to all of them but if you do not already know then it probably does not matter, whatever you end up learning though.
Mainly I would suggest getting one with a nice height tripod, a spotting/sighting scope attached (if you are looking at 1000x out then you will want a lower magnification scope to make sure you are looking where you want to be). Otherwise it ends up like buying a digital camera and there are a billion things you can look at but if you just want nice pictures then something that looks the part or more accurately meets some minimum requirements will do.
