The Celestron G5 is a nice small scope. You can take pictures with it but you won`t be able to go all that deep as it just isn`t that big of a scope.
The RA drive is a requirement for taking pictures as you need to follow the stars as they go across the sky at 15deg. per hour. You will also be wanting to put a second scope on the main scope just for tracking the stars better and correcting the position errors as the photo goes along of up to several hours. After you do a few, you will soon consider buying an autoguider to do the work for you. This can be anywhere from using a B&W QCam and some software available on the web to about $1000 for a complete system.
You might want to go to the Sci.Astro.Amateur newsgroup through your mail/newsgroup server. That is a very active newsgroup and questions like that are really up that particular alley.
Once you get a scope of some size, you are going to be hooked solid into the hobby.