It's been a while since posting - but as more experience and knowledge is gained with regards to astrophotography, the amount of information and options becomes overwhelming. What was needed was time to sort out just what are the activities that have the greatest interest to me and try and focus on them. Otherwise it becomes too confusing.
So - time was taken to take stock and try and lay out a broad scenario of activities for the foreseeable future.
Although efforts have been made to narrow-down activities, the wide range available only allows a general plan of attack. Activities - in the short term - will be guided by these broad factors.
- I have little interest in spending time and money to strive for the best possible result. Rather I want to use available time to learn about the night sky.
- I do not like many of the high-end post-processing results I've seen - especially using AI. I have seen results where the AI algorithm has decided that something should look a certain way and added features which are not real. The high-end post-processing looks too much like 'cosmetics' for my taste - indeed I've seen results which could be described as 'lipstick on a pig'.
- Apart from casual visual observing, I have no interest in assembling a very expensive astrophotography setup. I have found the use of my 'smart' telescopes (ZWO Seestar S50 and Dwarf II) entirely satisfactory for my level of activity. If I cannot set up in a few minutes and start observing I am not interested. Adding to the tedium of polar aligning a setup, the location here at home has restricted sky views due to trees. Consequently any form of permanent setup would need to be replicated in at least 5 or 6 places to provide access to a reasonable area of the sky. In addition the need to grab short periods of clear skies means the smart telescopes are much more suitable. I've seen claims by several individuals that they can setup and begin observing on their expensive assembled setup within 5 minutes - but no video proof is provided as far as I'm aware. I very much doubt anyone can carry out all the gear, assemble to a tripod, connect all the cables, polar align and begin observing in under 5 minutes.
I plan to take time to learn how to get the best out of the smart telescopes using minimal post-processing.
As a side interest I will switch my programming activities to various observation aids. The small patches of clear sky through the trees available on the home block makes planning complex. The process of determining which objects are visible from various locations is tedious and a time-waster. I'll code some applications which map the available sky areas and show the path of a given target object through those sky view windows.
To further reduce the setup time a variation of the 'Todmorden Pier' was prototyped. As the soil here is very reactive (moves due proximity to an escarpment and expands and contracts with moisture level) the digging of a deep hole for a concrete foundation was abandoned. Instead an assembly of concrete pavers and 'Besser' concrete blocks was built - to be described in the next post.