The Carina Nebula is about 300 light years across, twenty times the size of the Orion nebula. It is 9000 light years away but it stretches across 2 degrees of sky (about the width of 4 Moons). Two million years ago, the Carina Nebula was a huge dense and dark molecular cloud. The dark dust lanes are the remains of that cloud. Also see “The Great Nebula in Carina“. 
This image of the Carina nebula was taken with my recently modified Canon 350D. The 350D camera is now quite an old model and it is not supported by the latest Windows operating systems. This means that I have to use old software to assist me with the focussing of images such as this. For this image I used Astro Photography Tool (APT) version 1.93 (www.astroplace.net). I am quite happy with the performance of the 350D. It now outperforms my 600D for astrophotography, especially when deep space objects is imaged. I will try to stage a comparison between the results of the two cameras in a future post. The image above was created with 17 subs of 30 seconds each with five darks. I obviously used the modded 350D and a Canon EF-S 55-250mm lens at 250mm, f/5.6 at ISO 800. I tracked the sky with iOptron SkyTracker on a Meade tripod. The full resolution image is available at http://astrob.in/74776/0/
Edit on 10/03/2015: This image made it into the Australian Sky & Telescope gallery in the April 2015 issue.
stars*in*photos 