Astrophotography is an interesting but expensive hobby #TBT
Posted By RichC on June 16, 2022
As the warm evening and nights of summer arrive, I catch myself looking up at the sky again. It may have started with a purpose back when Charlie (Kamikaze) and 
I were locally sailing the “Fiberpile” and studying celestial navigation before there was much more than radio directional finders (LoranC was too costly and wasn’t helpful offshore anyway). That was the beginning (and end) of studying
the night sky for navigation and to make accurate star sights with a sextant … I was never really proficient. Anyway, the books got put back on the shelf, the plastic practice sextant tossed and by the time we had a real sailboat – Brenich (still own the domain); we weren’t sailing offshore anyway and didn’t need to navigate by the stars or even “steer by the stars” as in the phrase or in 1944 Olivia FitzRoy book title.
In the 1990s, we sailed Tulla, a NorSea 27 and I had a Garmin GPS 75 … and never looked back as Global Positioning expanded to fill the need and worked even when the weather turned sour.
Of course, the point of this post was to reflect on THIS century when my daughter Katelyn took an interest in astronomy. It was something I could semi-do with her and we enjoy the learning, and evenings looking at the stars and planets. She even bought a fairly expensive telescope with her own money and took an elective class while in college. 
For my part, it was just the grandeur of space, the beauty of the heavens and the awesomeness of God’s continually expanding creation that amazed and amazes me.
I probably read something on social media every day pertaining to space, astronomy and astrophotography … and realized just how invested some hobbyists are in their hobby and interest. Here are a couple photos from Andrew McCarthy as an example.
Click on images of Saturn and Jupiter for high resolution version
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