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I don't have time to perfect my alignment technique and while I find photography and astronomy exciting, the thought of sitting out there in the cold playing chase the star in the reticle for hours then NOT looking through my scope while I babysit and image is extremely unappealing. And for what? There are people who are spending crazy time and money doing the same. There are much larger telescopes and better more expensive tracking in research instruments.
Please note I am not putting down the stunning work that others do here. I'm just saying it's not for me.
So I went with my 12" Dob and intend to do a lot of visual. On the imaging side I've decided to learn to reduce images from the big instruments. I've downloaded and played with my first couple of sets of Hubble data using FITS Liberator and GIMP and though the results are just a beginning I'm pleased that after all these years I finally did it. I even posted one of these first attempts here.
FiTS Liberator instead of IRAF - which is what I touched on using back in the days I did my astro degree made it much more about getting a good image and much less about learning obscure commands and processing/calibration steps.
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