Quote:
Originally Posted by Shiraz
Mike, Greg, good posts. Agree, the fun really is in getting images you are happy with and modern low cost gear is able to do that for most people.
Agree also on the obsession with star shapes - it is cosmetically nice to have consistent stars across an image, but even the professional astronomers do not regard that as a necessary feature - they need to know where a star is, what colour it is and how bright it is. Stars should not be round anyway - they should be points. We are used to seeing round stars because most telescopes have evenly illuminated circular apertures, but round stars are really only an artefact that shows how imperfect the "perfect" telescopes are - even the best of them cannot resolve stars as the points they really are.
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Except that stars are a wave function so they show diffraction rings when out of focus.