I stumbled into astrophotography by chance in 2020 during the COVID lockdown, making the most of the unobstructed 360° view from my bedroom terrace. During those weeks my faithful Canon, a companion on many world travels, was laying left in the attic, gathering dust.
I had dabbled in Moon photography in the past, occasionally attempting to capture the full moon with minimal success, as is common for beginners. I quickly learned that with a standard 300mm zoom lens getting a decent moon shot was nearly impossible. Apart from that and some clumsy attempts at photographing the northern lights, I had hardly ever aimed my lenses at the sky.
Those weeks, somewhere on a website, I stumbled upon the possibility of capturing the ISS transit in front of the sun with a regular DSLR and it piqued my curiosity. So, at the earliest opportunity, I gave it a shot.
Incredibly, and to my amazement, using a 500mm zoom lens I had purchased for safaris, I managed to pull it off, even though the space station looked rather blurry. Nonetheless, it felt like an extraordinary achievement.
Back then, I had only a tripod, the camera, and a remote shutter release. That's when I began to delve into astrophotography, learning the basics online.
With that simple setup I had my initial experiences attempting to capture the Orion and the Horsehead Nebulae.
Not knowing anything about equatorial mounts, guide telescopes, goto systems, Bathinov masks, etc, but quickly grasping the basics of image stacking and registration techniques, thanks in part to my far university studies (I hold a degree in computer science, and back in the late '80s I wrote a thesis on satellite image processing), my initial forays into astrophotography involved long winter nights spent taking thousands of photos with very short exposures of one or two seconds to avoid star trails and manually adjusting the camera every 10-15 minutes to keep the target centered.
I studied the NPF rules of 500 and 600 and started to face with the issue of light pollution and the concept of input-referred noise vs. ISO setting. I delved into the magical world of image processing software for astrophotography, quickly realizing that my trusty Photoshop wasn't getting me very far. I gradually expanded my storage space to save and process those thousands of images, and spent days and days waiting for SiriL (the first software I started working with) to complete the stacking of those thousands of frames.
In the meantime, I devoured pages and pages of theory on the web and endured many cold nights on my terrace instead of getting a good night's sleep.
Then, months later, close to the end of 2020, I bought my first StarAdventurer 2i...
I won't even bother recounting the time I spent those months manually dealing with the polar alignement, wrestling with the sky of a bustling urban area like where I live, not to mention the crazy challenge of finding DSOs in the sky without any GoTo system, just trial and error — I guess you can well relate...
And so, three years have passed, and it feels incredible. Who would have thought that astrophotography would become my primary activity aside from my real job (and I'm not even sure if I can say it's second to it...).
While my gear has evolved over these years, and I now have a more capable equatorial mount and an auto-guiding, go-to and acquisition system, so far I'm still remaining loyal to my Canon, which I recently entrusted to a specialized lab to modify the sensor into a Super UV-IR cut, and I still rely on my traditional photo lenses. I'm not yet sure if I'll ever make the definitive leap by buying a telescope and a CCD camera, considering the costs, but I'm certainly looking around and studying...
By the way, I've become quite skilled at photographing the Moon: I've worked on long projects in these years, opened an online store and I've even sold a few prints!
Website
https://linktr.ee/habujoji
Job
CIO, temporary manager
Hobbies
Worldwide traveller (120+ countries around the world), hiking, photography, technology
