One thing I was looking forward to on my trip to Australia in 2009, was using the modified Canon Digital Rebel that I had recently purchased. In addition to using it through the telescope, I was interested to see just how well it performed with the standard 18mm - 55mm lens that it came with. I took quite a few images at different exposure times to compare with the film work I had done previously. Most of these images were of the Milky Way and are shown below. Overall, I was quite pleased with the results, although I did have difficulty in focusing the zoom lens at times!

Single Images

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Carina	Crux Australis The Southern Cross	Centaurus	Musca	Norma
Scorpius	Sagittarius	Scutum	Aquila	Milky Way Centre

Something I have enjoyed playing with has been to connect a variety of different camera lenses to the CCD and use them for wide-field imaging. Unfortunately it is not possible to focus a Lens while using the filter wheel so I have done little to try for colour imaging in this way. I have however made use of an h-alpha filter and this combination has worked wonderfully well, particularly for emission nebulae. Currently I am in the process of imaging the entire Milky Way in H-alpha with the aim of stitching them together for a complete panorama. Some of these images are included below.

Initially I used the lens at its widest setting, however this resulted in prominent stars having large halos around them. This was minimised by using the lens at f/4. It was interesting to see how one could control just how well the stars came through the filter by varying the focal ratio. At very short focal ratios, the cone of light is too steep for an interference filter to work properly. By increasing the focal ratio, the stars became more and more attenuated until they almost disappeared by f/5.6. This effect can be seen in some of the images shown below.

Single Images

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Aquila	Auriga	Ara	Canis Major	Carina	Cassiopeia
Centaurus	Cepheus	Crux Australis The Southern Cross	Canis Major	Cygnus	Gemini
Lacerta	Monoceros	Musca	Orion	Pegasus	Perseus
Puppis	Sagittarius	Sagitta	Scorpius	Scutum	Serpens Cauda
Taurus	Vela	Vulpecula	M 8 NGC 6523	NGC 6334	NGC 6960/6992 The Veil Nebula
IC 4604 region	Sharpless 2-1	The Coal Sack	Large Magellanic Cloud	Small Magellanic Cloud	Chiro Observatory East Dome

Mosiacs

Many of the images displayed in the above section overlap, so I joined them together to make mosiacs which are displayed below. Caution some of these images are large!

Vela - Carina	Carina - Centaurus	Scorpius - Sagittarius	Scorpius - Sagittarius	Scorpius - Aquila	Aquila - Cygnus
Cygnus - Perseus	Perseus - Casseopia	Taurus - Auriga	Orion - Vela	Monoceros - Vela