It depends what you mean by useful. On its own, all you're doing is taking pictures of the sky and figuring out where the camera was pointing (and its field of view). Where it's useful is calibrating the pointing direction of other systems. It's fun to try the software at home (there is a public web interface), you just need a camera that can take long enough exposures to see stars without too much noise.

One of the more "useful" backyard astronomy tasks that is achievable for a dedicated amateur is variable star observation (eg AAVSO), because many stars don't need huge telescopes to observe and it's very expensive for a big observatory to stare at a single patch of sky for weeks. Nowadays we have instruments like LSST which is basically designed for this sort of surveying, but public data are still useful. And you do need to know exactly where you're pointing, so either you do this manually by pointing at a bunch of target stars, or you can use a guide scope that solves the field for you.