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Thanks Alex, I'm glad to be able to give these images an appreciative audience!
As for dark skies, Ha rejects all but a narrow bandwidth so darker skies won't benefit the images all that much. The RGB components would benefit by requiring shorter exposures, but not much in any other way so imaging is a good viewing alternative for people who live under bright skies. But thanks so much for the offer, I do appreciate it.
Once a year I take my entire setup to Esk for 7 days and nights. This is a half day tear-down and setup so I don't like to do that too often. My main reasons for going to astrofest are not so much the darker skies, but the different aspect; i.e. I can position the setup for targets I can't see from my backyard. And of course the social aspect of catching up with friends I only see once a year.
I'm not really up to speed with digital cameras these days, but I get more and more impressed with their capabilities as the years pass. I think the biggest obstacle is with the IR filters installed in them for daylight use. If yours is one of the Astronomy versions without the IR-blocking filter, then you may well be able to take good Ha images with them. You will need a Ha filter and some way of mounting it between the camera and telescope. There are various flavours of deep sky Ha filters around, but you are probably best to get one with a wider passband. Mine is 10nm, there are others around that are 3nm (most of the stars will simply disappear and exposures will need to be very long) and up to 15nm, allowing more light around the Ha band to pass through. Unless doing extreme Ha data analysis, the wider filters are the way to go.
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