M31, an October evening, slaloming between the clouds... 

Few months ago, I considered Astrophotography as unreachable, due to the very specific knowledge it requires, and the cost of the dedicated hardware.
That being said, as an amateur photograph I was already in possession of decent photo gears (Fujifilm XT-4 + some lenses + tripod). So, I took it as a challenge to reuse as much components as possible, and build a rig enabling shooting deep sky objects...

I had many doubts about the performance of the images produced using this kind of setup.
First of all, I knew that long exposures with a non cooled camera, inevitably lead to noise impacting the quality of images. Therefore the time of exposure has to be very limited (60 seconds per sub in this case).
Secondly, since I live in a big city, light pollution is a player I cannot ignore. One of the most noticeable pros of the Mono Astro Cameras, is the ability to use filters with a monochrome photo sensor. This Combo, is considered by many Astro photographers as the go-to solution to reduce the light pollution noise effects. I was nowhere close to compete against such combination, with my stock unmodified XT-5 (although it's a wonderful camera for many other scenarios). So another challenge here is to be always ready to deploy my setup at a 'low light' location, whenever the opportunity presents.
That leads me to the third and last difficulty (yeah that should be enough for a bedtime reading...). Where I live, the weather is kind of capricious (read: depressive). At the time of writing, it's been more than a month we did not see a clear sky . In such conditions, I wanted a setup I could move and deploy quickly. For instance, the evening I shot these images, I only had a couple hours between the nightfall, and the time clouds showed up .

I know this image does not seem spectacular (especially when I see how gorgeous some of the Astrophotos here are ). But to me, reaching this result with the limitations I have mentioned and the 'amateurish' knowledge of mine, is an achievement that gave me hope, and lead me to buy a Mono Astro Camera... Ahem... I mean to higher my expectations.  

This image is a good example of what we can achieve with a 'common' camera and a bit of self education (oh... and a lot of patience), providing we can track the object for a relatively short duration (around 1h in total).
No cooled specific Astro-camera, no filters, no guiding: Just a refractor, a star tracker, and the Fujifilm XT-5 Camera I love  .
It is also my first attempt with the Takahashi Baby Q - FSQ85EDX, which, as far as I can tell, is an incredible piece of cake... I mean... refractor.