I’ve dabbled in amateur astronomy for many years, but I’ve never really gotten into astrophotography because, frankly, I didn’t have the patience. Or the funds. Especially considering where I live. It’s a Bortle 6 zone not far from Seatltle, so observing conditions are rarely great. This time of year it’s mostly overcast.
In the last several years, though, we’ve got some amazing new devices coming on the market that make the hobby a lot more accessible. And in the last year or so they’ve become much more affordable. I just got my hands on a Dwarf Lab Mini. So far, I’ve only had one good clear night to really put it through its paces, but I’m already blown away at what I was able to capture with no real experience. This is the M81 cluster after about 4.5 hours of 60s subframes. The auto-stacked results looked okay, but I grabbed the FITS files off the device and re-stacked them using Siril, then did some post-processing using Seti Astro Suite. Really not much, though. It almost feels like cheating.
I learned a lot about the night sky with my Skywatcher Heritage 130P. No smart scope though I really want one but could not afford it so had to get a regular telescope. Though I liked it for its portability. It could even fit in my backpack if I took off the stand. I used various apps on my phone like Stellarium to learn about where everything is in the night sky and I might not have bothered if I had a smart scope. So I am thankful. Though I don’t know where a lot of deep space objects are like nebulas, etc.