This is one of my first astrophotographs, taken in the summer of 2010. It became my "entrance ticket" into the world of astrophotography — a hobby that has now been with me for more than 15 years.
Back then, astrophotography itself didn’t really interest me; I was much more focused on visual observations of celestial objects through my Sky-Watcher 130/650 Newtonian telescope. I regularly went out to the outskirts of the small town where I lived at the time to observe. But one day, out of curiosity, I decided to bring a DSLR camera along and do some experiments.
My knowledge of star-imaging techniques was very superficial — I only knew that I needed to take a series of shots and then combine them in some special program. My patience at the time was enough only to aim at the constellation Sagittarius and shoot 12 frames of 10 seconds each. Honestly, I didn’t expect anything worthwhile to come out of shooting from a stationary tripod with an outdated Olympus E-300 camera and an old Pentacon 50/1.8 lens. At home, I quickly stacked the images in Deepskystacker, and no matter how poor my first attempt was, I personally liked the result: the photo revealed many more stars than I could see with the naked eye, and even showed a few faint nebulae.
Later, I tried photographing a few more areas of the sky in short series, but the results weren’t very successful. Shooting from a fixed tripod imposed serious limitations: long exposures turned the stars into streaks as they moved across the sky, while short exposures produced noisy, dim frames that revealed little, even when stacked by the dozens. At that time, I couldn’t afford a motorized equatorial mount, which would have allowed for longer exposures. Instead, I decided not to give up and began capturing not dozens, but hundreds of short-exposure frames. This approach eventually improved the final image quality and allowed me to pull out more details during processing.
This is how the image of the constellation Sagittarius came to life. For it, I captured about 400 frames with exposures ranging from 6 to 15 seconds. The final image is a mosaic of three fragments.
Working on this project was extremely difficult for me — I spent a lot of time learning astrophotography software, experimenting with processing, and struggling with my old PC, powered by a single-core Celeron, which could barely handle such a large number of files. Stacking alone took about 3–4 hours, and I restarted it many times because I was constantly dissatisfied with the results. It may sound funny, but I spent more than six months processing just the second frame: I started in the summer of 2010 and finally finished it in late winter of 2011.Still, these long “torments of creation” did not weaken my interest in astrophotography—on the contrary, they only fueled my desire to keep improving and to capture more and better images. I also realized something important: in this hobby, the most essential tool is not expensive gear, but persistence and patience.
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