Quote:
Originally Posted by Wavytone
Chris the only way to learn the night sky - for life - is to get your nose out of camera/computer screens and spend quality time outside under a dark sky. Regularly.
Sole companions should be a small refractor (70-80mm) or 7x50 binoculars, and a paper star atlas for your level, such as Nortons which provides a good guide to what's up there (plus the maps).
By the time you can claim to have seen all the things in Nortons (for your latitude) and the Messier objects you'll have learnt your way round.
Leave the cameras at home.
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Hi Wavytone,
I’m glad that we can at least agree on some things.
So far, the majority of my time has been spent doing exactly what you’re recommending. Namely, getting outside almost every night with a small refractor and binoculars.
The fuller story goes like this (Caution, it’s bound to get long…):
After having only a passing interest in the stars for the past 70 years I was outside one night in April this year under particularly pleasant conditions and idly wondered if I could get a photo of the beautiful sky. So I put a camera on a tripod, pointed it upwards and took a few time exposures. Many were failures, but some worked well enough to spark an interest in doing better.
Up until then my only previous attempts at night sky photography had been some basic shots of the moon (see example below showing a neighbour on her way to work…). But I have had many years general experience as a “happy snapper”. Some years ago I joined a flourishing local camera club for a while and was able to regularly do well in their monthly competitions, so I wasn’t a complete novice with a camera. For comparison, I have two good friends who had their own photography business at the time so I was well aware of the size of the gap betwen a reasonably competent hobby dabbler and a professional photographer. Technically, I was nowhere near their league, and I’m still not. What success I was able to achieve at Club level was mostly down to interesting composition and pictorial story telling.
So taking photgraphs of the sky was not a later add on to my interest in astronomy, it was actually the introduction to it.
As mentioned above, my favourite way of working is experimentation - aka trial and error. I have always found that the biggest single factor in mastering anything new is keeping the motivation up. It’s more important than the reading, and more important than the gear you buy. By far the biggest reason that many people drop out before reaching a goal is losing the motivation to keep going and then just drifting away. And what keeps motivation going can be a very personal thing, and will vary from individual to individual. And it’s not always predictable either. Sometimes a flagging interest can be revived by a new book, a fresh mentor or even a new piece of coveted gear. And all those can work for me too. But at the top of my list is the fun of trying a different approach, just to see what happens… So on that first night I didn’t go inside and read a book first, I just experimented with a variety of settings, and then studied the results later to try and learn why the failures failed and the relative successes didn’t.
I certainly do enjoy reading books - we have literally thousands of them in our house - but I prefer to do only a small amount of initial reading - just enough to get a “flavour”, but not to the extent of obediently following a recipe. Then I experiment for a while, make some mistakes and get a little bit of experience. Then when I do the next bit of reading both the jargon and the examples makes a lot more sense. Then I jump back in again…and so on.
A love of jumping in at the deep end and learning to swim before sinking to the bottom has served me very well over the years. For instance, it enabled me to give up working for others and support myself in my own businesses for over half my working life. Another example was that the knowledge that I gained from doing a bit of self-taught handyman work for myself and others, plus paying careful attention when I helped demolish some houses, enabled me to carry out a long standing dream of designing and building our own house. It required learning many different skills that I’d had no formal training in, and some stages were very slow, but it was incredibly satisfying to do, saved us a massive amount of money in costs, and quickly allowed us to be mortgage free. And, thirty years later we still live in it and nothing has fallen apart (with the possible exception of the builder.
)…
So I’m not very likely to change my preferred method of working now. I’ve always enjoyed the process of looking at an initial failure and working out how to turn it into a success.
Cheers,
Chris
Pics: Neighbour and moon from some years ago, plus two of the original pics from mid April this year that got me interested in learning the skies. Unprocessed except for downsizing to post. There were also quite a few with major errors, and I still keep one or two just to remind me where it began!