Hi All,
I'm only a beginner with astronomy and lately I've been thinking about if I want to get more serious (once the kids get a bit older and I hopefully have more discretionay time), and if so what direction I'd like to take, e.g., visual or AP. Before I had kids I used to enjoy normal (terrestrial!) photography, but AP seems like a different ball game - there's the equipment required (and the associated $
), as well as the committment to get a single image (e.g., potentially hours of exposure), plus post-processing the raw data.
Somewhere inside I feel that it would be great fun and a real challenge to do serious AP, but when I think about it some more I can't convince myself that I can commit (the money or the time) to it, as I can't really work out what it is that I'd get out of it. I am a bit of a hardware and software geek, but there are plently of other things I could do (requiring less money and less time) to meet that need, and I don't really relate to the "I did it" thing.
So I have a question for the people on the forum who do AP...why? Is it that you like playing with the hardware, and the challenge of getting everything "just right" to capture the image? Or is it the final image and being able to say "I did that"? Or both? Or something else altogether?
Thanks.
John.