The best part of learning astrophotography is not so much in taking awesome pictures … it’s the excuse to spend hours and hours sitting outside in the dark and staring up the night sky every night. To me the pictures are a bonus.
Absolutely! Just learning the positions of everything now and being able to describe them to people during the day has been pretty awesome. “Useless” knowledge, but I’ve always loved space lol
The knowledge of the position of the astres is anything but useless! It is one of the most pratical thing you can learn both for modern life application and very traditional use case.
It’s not ‘useless’ knowledge … if learning about the wider universe outside our small planet makes you realize what your place in this reality is, then I really don’t think it is useless, rather it is critically important because it makes our small insignificant existence in this vast universe far more special and humbling to the point where we look and see everything and everyone around us as so miraculous that we should do everything we can to enjoy this time that we have together in peace, love and harmony. It makes you realize its all we have and all we’ll ever be.
Definitely not useless knowledge.
Keeping looking at the stars, I’m watching the same sky as you.
Hey, nobody would have questioned the worse quality cameras that astrophotographers were doing this with 20 years ago. Even though it’s your phone now, it counts!
Phones are arguably some of the most powerful consumer cameras ever built. That Nikon or Canon might have more funny buttons and settings, but your phone camera is pretty powerful on its own.
In some ways phone cameras are very impressive, since CCDs are now cheap and good enough that they’re no longer the bottleneck. All the computational photography stuff they do boosts their capabilities even more.
The thing that really limits them is the size and optical quality of their lenses.
Hell my phone camera now is advanced enough that it has the ability to do “astrophotography” on its own without a telescope. The pixel series of phones after 4 has an astrophotography mode, the “ai” processing slightly corrects for star trailing. It’s been pretty crazy to just point my phone up and catch Andromeda or the Orion nebula!
I “do astrophotography.”
…I strap my phone to a telescope and I’ve been loving it lol
Strap your phone to a telescope?
So it’s a tele-phone?
Wait a min…
It’s a tele-tele-phone!
I did macro photography for a while by flipping my tele lens and holding it up to the mount the wrong way.
And I thought digiscoping was janky ghetto photography. This is just next level janky!
…why did I never think of this? Ingenious.
I got ADHD (why I did it) and got lucky (it didn’t break).
The best part of learning astrophotography is not so much in taking awesome pictures … it’s the excuse to spend hours and hours sitting outside in the dark and staring up the night sky every night. To me the pictures are a bonus.
Absolutely! Just learning the positions of everything now and being able to describe them to people during the day has been pretty awesome. “Useless” knowledge, but I’ve always loved space lol
The knowledge of the position of the astres is anything but useless! It is one of the most pratical thing you can learn both for modern life application and very traditional use case.
It’s not ‘useless’ knowledge … if learning about the wider universe outside our small planet makes you realize what your place in this reality is, then I really don’t think it is useless, rather it is critically important because it makes our small insignificant existence in this vast universe far more special and humbling to the point where we look and see everything and everyone around us as so miraculous that we should do everything we can to enjoy this time that we have together in peace, love and harmony. It makes you realize its all we have and all we’ll ever be.
Definitely not useless knowledge.
Keeping looking at the stars, I’m watching the same sky as you.
Hey, nobody would have questioned the worse quality cameras that astrophotographers were doing this with 20 years ago. Even though it’s your phone now, it counts!
That’s true and I can just plug it into my computer afterwards and do post processing!
Phones are arguably some of the most powerful consumer cameras ever built. That Nikon or Canon might have more funny buttons and settings, but your phone camera is pretty powerful on its own.
In some ways phone cameras are very impressive, since CCDs are now cheap and good enough that they’re no longer the bottleneck. All the computational photography stuff they do boosts their capabilities even more.
The thing that really limits them is the size and optical quality of their lenses.
Hell my phone camera now is advanced enough that it has the ability to do “astrophotography” on its own without a telescope. The pixel series of phones after 4 has an astrophotography mode, the “ai” processing slightly corrects for star trailing. It’s been pretty crazy to just point my phone up and catch Andromeda or the Orion nebula!