Shooting the Moon - first DSLR photography effort

I've been practising using the telescope and camera together.

Owing to it being a Dobsonian telescope, I have to use a Variable Eyepiece Adapter and shoot through an eyepiece - a 25mm eyepiece in this case. The reason for this is that a standard T-piece and adapter ring puts the camera CCD too far back from the usual eyepiece location for the telescope to focus. Sigh...

Variable eyepiece adapter

The eyepiece slots inside the adapter; a camera adapter ring screws to the end (bottom in this picture) and that clicks into the camera instead of a lens. Then the whole thing slots into the usual eyepiece hole in the focusser. It all gets a little heavy, so you have to keep things tight so the telescope doesn't take a dive south. A trick I've heard of is to fill an old magnetic mount torch with sinker and attach that to the bottom end of the scope to counterbalance it.

It's pretty tricky to get a good focus, relying mainly on manual telescope focus viewed on the LCD camera screen, zoomed in five times. And these shots are underexposed. But it's a start.