Just hit my 500th deep sky object and it felt different

I've been stacking photos of galaxies and nebulae for about 7 years now, and last week I crossed 500 unique objects captured from my backyard in Ohio. It was just a random number I wasn't even tracking until my folder count hit it, and honestly it made me stop and think about how much the tech has changed since I started with a basic DSLR. Does anyone else ever go back and look at their first few images compared to what they get now and feel kinda weird about it?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_sarah22d ago

Man, 500 is a real milestone. I remember looking at my first Orion shot from a tripod and a kit lens, and comparing it to my last one with a cooled camera and auto guiding, it almost feels like a different person took them.

parker_campbell22d ago

Bought a tracking mount secondhand that changed everything for me. It was some old iOptron thing that looked like it'd been through a war, but pairing it with a simple DSLR and intervalometer let me push exposures from 2 seconds to a full minute. That one jump let me actually catch the dust lanes in Andromeda instead of just a fuzzy blob, and I felt like I'd hacked the universe or something.