Many a telescope owner, after gazing at the sky for a while, wants more; wants to share what she or he is seeing.
There are several ways to achieve this. The most obvious is shooting through the telescope eyepiece with a small camera or cell phone. Since this is very difficult to do hand-held, you can find many economical cellphone adapters on the web (± USD 20).
The other alternative is using the telescope as if it were a long fixed-focal, fixed-aperture lens, mounting a DSLR or mirrorless (CSC) camera sans lens on the telescope focuser.
In this article we explore the different alternatives, tools, pros & cons of both methods.

Eyepiece projection

The advantage of shooting through the eyepiece, so-called eyepiece projection, is that its magnification allows you to get a high enlargement on sky objects.
The disadvantage is that a cell-phone or a point-and-shoot are not great cameras and, moreover, that image quality heavily depends on the optical quality of one’s eyepieces.
If you still use the eyepieces that came bundled with your telescope, you may want to upgrade at least one before venturing into eyepiece projection. Otherwise you are most likely going to get disappointed.
That said, in my research for this article I came across a DSLR adapter for eyepiece projection (USD 150), which could possibly overcome the low IQ issues of cell-phones and point-and-shoot cameras.
However, I have no idea how well it works. Check it out for yourself clicking here. 

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Yup!, I’ve been off of the radar for quite a while. We spent most of September in Amsterdam, to meet my first grandchild (and what a grandchild!!), hook up with the family and do all of the tourist-stuff I’d never ever had even dreamed about when I was still living there.
Would you believe that I did not have ANY pictures of my home town in my portfolio? Well, that’s been corrected:

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It's been almost a year since I wrote the original article (here) on the notorious EN-EL3e False Low Battery Warning (FLBW), and I am still unaware of any official responses from Nikon on this issue, nor of any suggestions on how to solve it - even if only temporarily.
If you are aware of any official Nikon response, I would appreciate it if you could point me to it.

Possible Solutions

After an extensive review of suggested solutions, by users here and on other forums, here are some ideas that might work for you:
1 – Using genuine Nikon batteries and not third party rip-offs helps, but is no guarantee that you will not fall victim to FLBW, either now or at some point in the future. Many users report this problem after having had their cameras for several months.
The D200 and D700 appear to be the least affected; the large majority of users have a D300(S), D90 or D80.
2 – Update firmware if you have not done so already. Users report solving the problem after updating to the latest firmware, especially in the case of the D300.

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I’m seeing a lot of people on the net discussing a false low-battery warning problem with the D300 and the EN-EL3e, the standard battery for the D80, D90, D200, D300(S) and D700.
This is serious, because it will impede the camera to function properly, or even fire at all.

The problem appears to have two origins.
A minority of affected users have genuine Nikon EN-EL3e's in combination with what to me are now "suspect" lenses: AF-S and/or VR, with the AF-S VR 70-200 f/2.8G. getting the most "votes", sofar.
Of the users who have earlier D300 production models, a large majority is able to solve the problem with a firmware update.

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Samples of my images with the D40 (You can check Exif by clicking the camera icon at the top of the image), or check my Flickr Photostream with lots of D40 images...
Manual

Summary:
I bought the D40 with the 18-55 kit-lens as a back-up camera, to team with the D200 for a trip to the Atacama Desert in early 2008, considering that in such a dusty environment it would be a nightmare to change lenses.
I also considered the 10.2 Mp. D40X (Discontinued) but it cost $ 562 for the body alone, and I would still have been forced to buy an additional AF-S lens, because I did not own any light motorized lenses.

Sure, I could mount the AF-S 17-35 mm. f/2.8D, but it is so heavy that one loses all the advantages of a lightweight and compact camera, which – in my mind – is the mayor advantage of the D40.
I never have used the 17-35 on the D40, as a matter of fact, unlike the HSM 100-300 mm. f/4 Sigma (review) which has seen far more action on this camera than I would have ever expected...
What finally cut the deal were the good – and justified so – reviews for the AF-S 18-55 mm. kit-lens. I do not use it much anymore though, because in October last year I bought a Sigma 18-200 mm. f/3.5-6.3G which has hardly left the camera ever since (review).

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I have been photographing since the age of 8, and using Nikons since the age of 19, so, after some 35 odd years, you can imagine the amount of useful and useless Nikon stuff I have accumulated, and can talk about. Although my Nikon film cameras (FE, FM) are still fully operational, they have been collecting dust for the best part of the last decade.
The good news is, of course, that I can still use my seventies AI, AI-S lenses on most of the modern Nikon DSLR bodies; they meter in manual and aperture priority, indicate focus, register aperture in EXIF and do everything else you may expect of a lens, except – of course – auto-focus.
Especially the 50 mm's appear to be back in vogue, mostly because of their outstanding wide open performance (@ f/1.4, 1.8 and 2.0) and their remarkable bokeh. The DX crop factor of 1,5 turns them into very apt 75 mm. portrait lenses.
As I understand, Canon have gone through as many as 5 – not always backward compatible – mount changes since the late fifties. Glad I have invested in F-Mount.
Can you imagine dumping your glass every 10-15 years, because your lenses will NOT mount on the next generation bodies of your favorite camera brand?

Anyway...
I got my first digital P&S camera in 1999, and with the benefits they bring to my advertising work flow, they have become more and more dominant over the last decade.
Today I sell much of my advertising work through comprehensive, photographic mock-ups. My first “serious” digital camera was the Nikon D1X, which I picked over the D100 because I had – what I considered – a large investment in un-chipped MF (manual focus) glass at the time, lenses that could not be used with the D100. First mistake, but I’ll come to that in another post.

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For starters, anybody who expects stellar optical performance from a 400 dollar 11,1x zoom, better stop reading right now. It is not going to happen, not with this one, nor with the Nikkor, even if it costs $ 300 more.

Summary:
I got this lens in a hurry, because I needed an all-purpose lens to cover a spur-of-the-moment client event. At the time, this was the only 18-200 mm. available in Santiago.
I also took a look at the (now discontinued) 18-125 mm. f/3.5-5.6D Sigma, but decided against it because it lacked the built-in focus motor necessary on the Nikon D40, my target camera.

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