Originally posted by jawats: I have noticed the strange tendency of my images to improve as I add money to the hobby.
Sadly this is one of the few areas of photography where throwing money at the problem is often a valid and correct solution. It is why I own a SMC A* 400mm f/2.8 ED [IF] and now the Laowa 12mm f/2.8 Zero-D. You quickly find the limitations of your gear and while it is possible to work around some of them the results of work arounds are often sub par.
Originally posted by jawats: I'm looking into building a serious tripod now - one that can remain stable over 15-30 lbs of equipment.
Best of luck. Also if you are using
my $50 one as a basis I would suggest using fender washers over regular washers. I just recently change them out on mine and not wanting to be wasteful wish that I had used them from the start.
Originally posted by Lew Dite: I still don't know how it got into that state in the first place but I do know that I wasted a perfectly good night.
Could be worse, it could have happened on one of those almost once in a lifetime cases like it did to me last summer. I was out in Crested Butte, CO and has setup right above some buried power lines between 2 transformers that were just off in the vegetation with 1 about 10 feet away and the other about 40. When I set up I didn't' see them. and never got astro tracer to work worth a damn. So I got to shoot entirely untracked and didn't bother with the long glass. To add insult to injury my wides were old M42 screw mount lenses (28/3.5 and 17/4 fisheye) so not exactly even good astro lenses but with the 28 I was planning on using astrotracer to make up for having to stop it down to 5.6.In the end I did get some good sunrise shots 4 hours later but the night was a bust. At least it is a place that I will likely be back at in the future but it won't be for several years so I can correct my screw ups. Lesson learned that time was do a site survey during the day.
Originally posted by jawats: I will keep at it
Here you have a good community that is more than willing to help you improve and some who are capable of posting images that inspire the rest of us to get better and show was is possible. It isn't like this is facebook photo groups where the few astrophotographers take a beating because of the amount of computational photography we have to engage in and the vast amount of editing that goes into our images.
I've been taken to task because of composite shots because people think it is possible to expose the moon and foreground correctly in the same shot, or had others claim images are faked when going after DSOs. My favorite is when the canon, nikon, and sony shooters say I am lying about how I got an image, I got that most recently when I posted a tight crop of M57 I got with the A* 400/2.8 and 1.4X-L converter. Milky way shots are the worst for complaints, again because they are often composites with a stack for the background and a single long exposure for the foreground. The only time I take issue with composites are when the scene could never have existed. So the gigantic moon in drone shots, stuff in the sky flipped (I've seen this a lot), the moon oriented incorrectly, colors completely wrong (I once saw a shot of M31 where it looked like it had done acid) and even then I rarely bring it up unless the person is being an a-hole about things. I have also defended other astrophotographers who get taken to task, one recently was getting abused for "faking" as shot of split rock light house with the milky way over it because other claimed that there is no way that the milky way would be oriented like that there even though I was able to figure out that the scene was composed of shots taken around 1:30 AM. Of late on the local FB photo there has been a series of shots mocking the few astrophotographers and unfortunately it has been mostly "pros" doing it.