Sounds even more extreme than the censorship in China, and nobody fucking cares.

I have an "entry level" setup that cost me around $2000.

Your photos are great.

I saw your setup, pretty good stuff. Equipment you used, and the price points:

TS-Optics Photoline 80mm APO Triplet ($800)
QHY 163M ($1199)
SkyWatcher EQ6-R Pro ($2000)
ZWO ASI 120MM ($134)
ZWO EAF ($248)
ZWO EFW ($269)
Optolong 7nm Ha, 6.5nm Oiii, 6.5nm Sii filters ($720 for a 3 piece kit)

So you spent... around $5,370 to take these stunning photos. That's not even taking into account what you spent on software, which is more than likely equal in value.

I could show you the images I captured with my $2,000 setup, but they aren't great, and of course my wife wasn't happy with how much I spent on this hobby. However, I'm not going to do that, because of course you're going to shit all over it with your $10,000 setup. I'm so frustrated with this talking point about "processing" skill, I'm going to download some raw data, and show you just how easy this shit is.

Take a look here:

https://astrobackyard.com/astrophotography-image-processing-challenge/

Without looking at the end of Trevor Jones' blog page, tell me which one is done by him and which one is me fucking around in GIMP for 30 minutes. https://imgur.com/a/bOTVx5g

When you're ready, scroll to the end of Trevor Jones' blog post and see if your guess was correct.

> Edit because I didn’t see: yes my mount was expensive but the mount is the single most important piece of equipment in AP. My mount isn’t even that exotic if you’d know other astronophotographers.

Funny, I thought the single most important piece of equipment is the astrophotographer's skill. /s

I don't know why people think astrophotography processing is difficult. The hardest part of astrophotography is obtaining the money required to acquire a guided mount with minimal bearing play, decent apochromatic scope, autoguider, software for said autoguider.

Anybody can learn how to adjust curves in Photoshop or run a script that uses somebody else's algorithm to make stars look smaller. I'd love to hear a counterpoint to this.

I’m not talking about the images in this post. The images in this post are taken with vastly different equipment. I am referring to images OP linked in the comment above. The images in his comment are a much more subjective matter of taste. More red=better image? Really? There's no contrast in the second one. It looks blown out.

I can’t tell which is the before and which is the after on the sample you provided. Neither is objectively better, it’s just a matter of taste.

And sorry, but to be blunt Trevor Jones has many photos which I consider much better than the example you provided.

As a final note, just the mount alone for your setup costs over 1.5 grand.

Astrophotography is sadly one of those hobbies where it’s not so much skill but how much you spend that makes the biggest differences.

I would love to be proven wrong…