>>14330853I want to add that getting the modest quality of image I'm able to achieve takes extreme patience. Astrophotography is NOT 5-minutes-in-and-out type of deal. If you aren't okay with spending 2+ hours setting up with the distinct possibility of getting absolutely nothing because weather conditions deteriorated, this hobby isn't for you. If you aren't okay sitting completely still in total darkness and possible sub-freezing temps for 5+ minutes at a time so that your equipment doesn't vibrate and your camera isn't exposed to stray photons, this hobby isn't for you (yeah, you have to put your phone away).
It took me a week of intensive practice to get comfy using my German-equatorial mount (reading the manual several times was necessary), a similar amount of time to learn the camera, and yet another amount of time researching how to properly attach the two. Setup each night—before I can *even begin* taking pictures—involves a *solid* 90 minutes of balancing the scope & mount and aligning the clock drive (and that's with practice). Moreover, my mount isn't computerized, so I must find each object manually (without an eyepiece I might add since the camera is occupying the slot, carefully-focused & can't be touched)....all told, I can get MAYBE four objects over the course of a night before I'm exhausted.
Anybody in this thread who bought a telescope, set it up outside in 5 minutes, put their shitty phone camera up to the eyepiece, and now came here to complain about how astrophotography is a photoshop scam simply didn't have the patience to properly research how to do what they're trying to do. It cannot be understated how important patience is to get something out of astronomy as a hobby, and it doesn't help that decent equipment can be rather expensive.
Finally, if you want to take pictures of anything other than the moon, planets, and terrestrial objects...YOU NEED A CLOCK DRIVE to enable long exposures without star trails. NO EXCEPTIONS.
