Hope this low effort post is accepted, I just wanted to share my first image when I started.
There was no telescope or tracker used, just a smartphone leaned against my wallet.
Images:
- ~400 x 1s
- ISO 3200
Editing:
- stacking/ stretching in Siril
- GraXpert for gradient and denoising
- BlurXTerminator for deconvolution
- Starnett++ to edit the barely visible nebula a bit better
- final editing in Photoshop
To my mind, a lot of astrophotography seems to be hooking a camera up to a telescope, making sure it’s focused right, and taking a buncha pictures. Of course proper maintenance of equipment plays a massive role, but my understanding is that a lot of the effort comes from knowing how to post-process
Yes processing the image plays a huge role.
But at the end you can only work with the information provided by your equipment as there are physical limitations on what one can capture.
To me the most interesting part of this hobby is to learn what you physically really have to do to get good images. Physics not only plays a role on understanding what we see in these images but also on how to make them.
Truly fascinating!