Comment by hestipod | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hestipod | Hacker News Reader

I've developed a fascination with astrophotography, one day hope to have a camera that can manage more than pinpoints/streaks/black noise, and while I always liked to go look at the stars on clear nights the technical aspects of it have reawakened the interest in space. Seeing the Milky Way across the sky at night with the naked eye is amazing and makes it hard to forget your smallness. You can get lost thinking stars are just pinpoints of light because they all generally look the same, but larger masses of them and seeing galaxies, clusters etc in binoculars etc just juices me up. Imaging that I can SEE Jupiter but the light is taking 45min to reach me is mind-blowing. Forget the larger distances to stars...it's inconceivable at times. Sometimes I have gotten vertigo seeing how our Solar system is tilted and imagining us swirling through the arm.

One thing that seems to have changed is visible satellites. Or maybe I am just missing them. I recall as a child watching the sky with my grandfather and you'd regularly see a "star" moving across the sky and he'd excitedly point it out as a satellite.

I can totally relate to what you’re describing. The vertigo you mention reminds me of the Total Perspective Vortex [0] from the “Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” books by Douglas Adams. I totally agree about seeing the Milky Way, the rings of Saturn or the Andromeda galaxy with your own eyes (with the help of binoculars or a small telescope). This really gives you a different perspective on our existence, life and the grand scale of things. One last piece of advice to aspiring astrophotographers, this is an expensive hobby and an addictive “disease” :-)

[0] https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex

I love those books. I always seem drawn to these super expensive technical hobbies like astronomy and photography that are out of reach. You just cannot do them well cheaply and I've wasted money in the past on crap telescopes etc. The "lotto list" has a high quality telescope, tracking mount etc, and cameras right toward the top. One of those backyard observatories and the skills to make my own telescope properly would be a dream.

>one day hope to have a camera that can manage more than pinpoints/streaks/black noise

You can build an arduino-powered "barn-door tracker" for ~$40 that will significantly help with this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hqXqqTtWzU

If you're hoping to hook up a DSLR to a telescope this won't help though, not big enough. Plus, this style of tracker only tracks through one axis, limiting exposure time to ~10seconds before stuff gets blurry & drift destroys the image... but that's still better than the ~2seconds or so that you get without it.

That's very cool thank you. I seem to recall an astronaut on the ISS making something kind of related with parts on hand...Don Pettit I think?

*Found it: https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2003/2...

Do you mean 10 minutes? He lines it up with Polaris, so it only needs one axis of rotation. But I guess the alignment isn't that good since it is just eyeballed, but it should work for exposure times much longer than 10 seconds. He is even rotating the screw every 15 seconds which wouldn't make much sense for a 10 second exposure. =) Clever little project in any case. Thanks for sharing the video.

I regularly see satellites passing overhead in inland Australia

You may be watching later at night. Low Earth orbit satellites are in the shadow if you watch later at night. As a child you probably only watched the sky shortly after sunset while satellites still catch the sun.

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