You mean something like http://www.itelescope.net/ ? Also check for a local amateur astronomy association.
Research telescopes often have live feeds for popular events (such as the Venus transit).
Finally depending on your location you may be no further than a day trip away to an astronomical facility - they often have events open to the public, stargazing etc.
BTW Here's another "christmassy" picture (this time of the Bubble Nebula) from a brand new instrument:
Another related development in democratization of astronomy is publishing of transient events (brightenings/dimmings of objects) as they happen. You can subscribe to feeds from robotic transient surveys, that do the image processing and photometry to generate events in near real time (e.g.: http://skyalert.org/). The events are published in a standard format so you can automate follow-up as well.
Many of the events are asteroids or possible NEOs, but others are galactic and extra-galactic, like supernovae, blazars, etc.
It's not backyard astronomy, because the events are being detected by 1 meter telescopes and have magnitude of perhaps 18 or 20, but it's a more open and data-rich situation than a few sources being kept under wraps for follow-up by the discoverer only.
Research telescopes often have live feeds for popular events (such as the Venus transit).
Finally depending on your location you may be no further than a day trip away to an astronomical facility - they often have events open to the public, stargazing etc.
BTW Here's another "christmassy" picture (this time of the Bubble Nebula) from a brand new instrument:
http://www.noao.edu/image_gallery/html/im1136.html
Disclaimer - Latter link is my employer, but I have nothing to gain from you clicking on it :-)
Oh Edit: you can also go data-mining in public astronomy databases, though sadly most of them are not geared for use by the general public.
Oh Edit2: You can have some fun with this http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/ but you need Silverlight