Thanks guys! Encouragement and advice is always welcome.
I was very excited to see clear(ish) skies last night when I got home from nightshift so I set up the scope, quickly aligned it and used the moon for focusing then waited for it to get out of my sky
The Pleides were already past my very narrow viewing window by then so I found M42 and I was blown away by my first exposure! It was just 5 seconds to check the framing but I could clearly make out the trapezoid and the dark lanes which make up the bowl, I was practically skipping around the backyard by now and I set up the camera to take 10 shot bursts at various exposure times. Until I work out the finer points of controlling my DSLR from my laptop I'm limited to 30 second subs but I was still very happy with the results.
http://i735.photobucket.com/albums/w...72495800_o.jpg
I know it's grainy and washed out, the stars aren't perfect and there's lots of coma, but I'm still ridiculously excited about it.
I ended up with two lots of subs because my batteries ran out halfway through
