Hi Ed:
You really don't want to get me started on my astronomy hobby...
Yea I've tinkered with taking pictures. It's more of a pain than you'd imagine. Focusing is tricky, and if you're doing long exposures (say more than 60 seconds) then you need to have a pretty accurate way to track the motion of the earth. All of this I have, but (a) it can always get better and (b) while I'm still learning it's a pain to set up on the road. Also, given how detail oriented the above 2 tasks are, I find that if I'm photographing I'm not very social!
Regardless, the easiest way to get started is "piggy back" where I put my DSLR on the back of my scope and the DSLR is armed with a 300mm lens. The scope tracks the sky. Piggy back mode with "only" a 300mm lens is more forgiving of a less-than-perfect alignment/tracking system. The pictures below are from that set-up.
One of my favorites... the crescent moon and the Pleades.
The Andromeda Galaxy
The Lagoon Nebula (and the Triffid nebula above that).
However "inept" I may be at this, many folks are quite adept at setting up their imaging rigs at these star parties. On a lark I googled for one of my fav things to see in the night sky specifically looking for someone who took an image at Table Mountain. I was in luck. This
fellow's site is here.
Another example (same object... the Veil Nebula, but this just a select portion of it) is here... again this was at Table Mountain, but a few years ago.