What you are thinking of doing is a common technique for getting pictures of the Moon through a telescope. It's called the afocal technique and it works very well for the Moon.It's bright enough so you don't need any special stuff or fancy ideas to do it with.
Just hold the camera very close to the eyepiece with the lens zoomed to a long focal length to get the narrow field you need, half press the shutter release, wait for the focusing , and press the shutter. You won't need the self timer.
On the second picture here you'll see the guy holding the camera close to the eyepiece to take a picture.
http://www.darkerview.com/darkview/index.php?/archives/321-Afocal-Photography.html . . . .
Here's the technical stuff but you can get good piccies without getting too technical
http://www.saao.ac.za/~wpk/exposure.html . . . . . .
The exposure will be quite fast so there is no problem with hand holding the camera....up to a 1/300th of a second for the full Moon and 1/30th for a thin crescent Moon at 60x power through a wide aperture telescope .
For other astronomical objects you need more stuff. An adapter to fit the camera to the telescope, and a motor drive so the telescope can follow the stars, because the exposures will be longer. If you haven't got manual control of aperture and shutter speed on the camera you'll be much more limited than with cameras that have them.
Without a motor driven terlescope you'll only be able to get pictures at low power of bright star clusters or of Jupiter and it's satellites, which isn't visible now anyway, and of the other brighter planets but not big enough to see disks on the planets because when the power is that high the light isn't bright enough for unguided exposures.
You'll get some very impressive pictures of the Moon if you take a bit of care, and with the camera mounted properly onto the telescope you can do them at very high powers which will mean exposures of 1/4 second or more so it's too long to hand hold the camera.
The higher the power you use on the telescope the darker the image is because the same amount of collected light is spread over a larger area, so keep the power low to get enough light for hand held photos. With the Moon there is enough light to take pictures through a 60mm refractor at 100x with a hand held camera with the ASA/ISO setting on 200.
With a larger aperture telescope you can use more power because the larger aperture collects more light.
Here is some more info about cameras on telescopes. Long answer from me has links for adapters etc.
Forget the best answer. The weight of a compact camera will be no problem at all as he'd know if he ever fixed one to a telescope and used it. There's a lot of armchair astronomers in this section.
https://answersrip.com/question/index?qid=20091219113449AA3Kmi8 . . . . .
.........EDIT...........
If you take the eyepiece out you can get pictures but you'll have to mount the camera properly onto the telescope or it's just too awkward to do.
That way it uses the camera lens as a projection eyepiece.
With an SLR you can take the lens off and use the telescope eyepiece as a projection eyepiece, or take the eyepiece out and use the prime focus image focused directly onto the film.
That's three different ways to do it.
1. Afocal technique. Put the camera close to the eyepiece.
2. Projection method using the camera lens or the eyepiece.
3 Prime focus method
Get some afocal pics of the Moon. It's very easy and you get surprisingly good results first time with a little bit of care.
For stars and planets you need more stuff. A digital compact will do a little bit, but not much. Having manual exposure control lets you do more, including using the camera by itself for wide view shots like the whole of Orion or the Plough.
If your camera shutter can stay open for a few seconds it will record some of the brighter stars.
At five minutes exposure you'll get all the stars you can see with the naked eye if the aperture canopen wide enough...F4.5 minimum
At half an hour exposure at F4.5 you get some nebulae and galaxies like the Orion nebula and Andromeda galaxy but very small without a telescope or a very long zoom on the camera.
A 300mm lens on a 35mm camera is favourite for those, with half an hour to an hour exposure at F5.6 on 200ISO film.
Here are some pics with a 300mm lens. See the search box.
http://images.google.com/images?q=andromeda%20300mm%20lens&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi . . . . .