I’ve dabbled in amateur astronomy for many years, but I’ve never really gotten into astrophotography because, frankly, I didn’t have the patience. Or the funds. Especially considering where I live. It’s a Bortle 6 zone not far from Seatltle, so observing conditions are rarely great. This time of year it’s mostly overcast.

In the last several years, though, we’ve got some amazing new devices coming on the market that make the hobby a lot more accessible. And in the last year or so they’ve become much more affordable. I just got my hands on a Dwarf Lab Mini. So far, I’ve only had one good clear night to really put it through its paces, but I’m already blown away at what I was able to capture with no real experience. This is the M81 cluster after about 4.5 hours of 60s subframes. The auto-stacked results looked okay, but I grabbed the FITS files off the device and re-stacked them using Siril, then did some post-processing using Seti Astro Suite. Really not much, though. It almost feels like cheating.

  • SolidShake@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    1 month ago

    I have a seestar s50. I’ve always wanted to do astrophotography but could never afford all the comments necessary, but I can afford a smart scope. I absolutely love it. Just find a thing, shoot it for a few hours, collect the stacks and be terrible at processing them because idk how to use siril

    Also keep in mind of you bought a scope and the camera and tracker and hooked it up to a laptop. It does the same thing. So I wouldn’t call it “cheating” I’d call accessible

    • IamSparticles@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      2·
      1 month ago

      Also keep in mind of you bought a scope and the camera and tracker and hooked it up to a laptop. It does the same thing.

      Years ago, when I was first considering getting into astrophotography, I had an equatorial mount for my telescope and I tried steering it with Stellarium running on a laptop. Via a plug-in. And a bluetooth dongle connected to the mount. With a special driver that sent the serial commands over the bluetooth connection to the mount… It worked, but getting it set up and aligned took ages, and if any part of that chain glitched I had to start over. I never even got as far as adding a camera to the mix, LOL. These smart scopes have everything integrated into one self-contained package.

      This is definitely making things more accessible for me. I guess I’m just curious how the grognards of the hobby react to these developments.