Also, photometry....you can do simple photometry on reasonably bright stars using a webcam to take the piccies of the target stars and programs like IRIS...
http://www.astrosurf.com/buil/us/iris/iris.htm, to analyse the data you capture. IRIS is free, which is a good start
. You can also use it to capture and render images as well. You can obtain and measure light curves for the target stars to measure the rotation of starspots and the stars themselves, transits of eclipsing binaries and exoplanets, measure stellar variability etc.