The wonders of toilet paper roll and sticky back plastic

I want to take some super awesome sweet photos of the night sky, using my digital camera.
What to do?
Well, I had an idea. After trying unsucessfully to get the crappy camera attachments on my big telescope to work, I came upon the idea to make my own.
I have previously taken snapshots of the moon, by placing the digital camera lens against the eyepiece of the telescope and hoping for the best.
I realised that for good, focussed, crisp and clear shots, I needed a method of temporarily attaching the digital camera to the eyepiece, in a manner that would allow me to take a nice photo.

What I needed was the old Blue Peter recipe:

Toilet rolls, kitchen paper rolls and some sticky back plastic!!!!

It was on!!!

I used the lens of my camera as a guide and the eye piece diameters and amount of eyepiece that jutted out as a guide for the basic but effective cylindrical design that would hug the eyepiece and lens and hold them together firmly enough for me to step away and also to block out any extra light and get the lens as close to the eyepiece lens as possible.

(Phew- that was some sentence! If Norris MuckSquirter were still alive, he may call it a Guinness World Record)

I have a few lenses, ranging from 20mm focal lengths to 6mm.
They also protrude at different lengths from the telescope eyepiece holder.

I made the barrel camera holder in two different cylindrical sections, as the lens on my digital camera protrudes out as two barrels of different widths. No problem. Using black tape, I made the adapters fit snugly.

Here are the lenses I am going to test (20mm, 10mm and 6mm), along with their corresponding adapters for the digital camera:


Next, I will show two photos, the first showing the eyepiece on the telescope and the second photo with the digital camera attcahed, using the adapters.

First, using the 20mm eyepiece:
Now, with the camera attached:

Using the 10mm eyepiece:
Now, with the camera attached:

Using the 6mm eyepiece:
Now, with the camera attached:


They seem to work. I just needed to test them.

It was time to take photos of bricks!!!!!

I took my scope out on the balcony and tried to centre it on the furthest point I could find. This was the brick wall of the apartment complex, about 500m away.
Here's a photo taken using the digital camera with no zoom:
(the arrow shows the approximate area of the bricks in question)

Next, here are the photos I took using the three eyepieces and their holders:

20mm:

10mm:

6mm:

(The photos were only slightly cropped and not altered digitally with software in any way).

Nice.
I like bricks.

When the weather clears up, I'll take some shots of the moon, the planets and some nebulae/galaxies - if I can.

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Next, I'm thinking of cutting myself and taking a shot of my blood at 700x magnification...