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Comment by malfist | Hacker News Reader

You'd be surprised what you can see under light pollutes skies. Especially in narrowband. I built an observatory in a bortle 7 and I get plenty of good data. Link in profile if you wanna see my work

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I can see Jupiter, Saturn, the Moon, etc. But even looking at Andromeda is difficult. Pleiades is also difficult. I'm minutes outside of downtown, so light pollution in my area is intense.

I think GP was mostly referring to astrophotography when it comes to light-polluted areas. I live in a bortle 9 area (downtown) and unless I bring out my 20" dobsonian I'm mostly visually limited to double stars, planets, bright clusters, and extremely bright emission nebulae such as M42. With modern LED broad-spectrum lighting, skyglow definitely becomes a major issue, especially for broadband targets like Andromeda.

However, I've been able to capture stunning images (and an APOD) even in broadband within my city using dedicated astro cameras and modern gradient processing techniques quite easily, so we're definitely living in the golden age for EAA if you'd consider that as an alternative.

Nice shots! Do you have any information posted about your observatory build and specs?

I ran a build thread on cloudy nights while making it: https://www.cloudynights.com/forums/topic/895712-build-threa...

Come to learn how I did it, stay for the drama of getting swindled by nexdome lol

Something I found funny during the entire saga, I'd have expected to see a fully built shed that was started/completed after the dome started but before it finished. You know, as the icing on the cake!

That happened on the other side of the yard. Had a tuffshed put in and they built it in two days. We actually rented the skid-steer to flatten the area for it and just so happened the place also rented augers to dig the hole for the pier

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