Yes, motivation is the key. Stay outside for hours when it’s freezing, you must get some big motivation.
Of one day you get some, you will have to consider 2nd hand equipment. I did it many times.
Big telescope needs expensive equipment, fine and long setup. It’s hard to manage.
Light equipment like az-gti mount, small camera like asi178mc (quite cheap but noisy; it gets a 14 bits ADC which is not so common) or more actual camera and a 20$ CCTV lens and you are ready for months or years.
Actually, my job takes me too much time and I am exhausted. So, the big telescope does not move at all and I can only use the small equipment if I get enough motivation (for exemple, today, I don’t get motivated even if the sky is clear).
It would easier if I get retired but this won’t happen before 10 years I guess.
We have to be optimistic and get sure we will be strongly motivated. One day.
my last production. Classical satellites hunting (mainly SpaceX), The Andromeda galaxy using HDR and at the end, it’s me in the cold, trying to find the good settings to get me in HDR mode with high frame rate.
Maybe 16b brings more stable colours. Not sure of that.
An interesting thing : when you look at deep sky object with your eyes, you don’t see colours. Just white. It is a bit disappointing when you look at M42 for example. Not really beautiful.
With a camera, you get the colours.
I have a fireplace but when the temperature is really cold, a fireplace is not enough. You get freezing for hours even if the temperature at home is warm. This is not really cool.
In theory, JetsonSky can track anything but it will depend of the optic and the camera. Space debris can be quite small and i would need a very small F/D ratio with high focal to see the small debris.
With plate solving, i could know the target coordinates and therefor know the object trajectory.
I will try to use Tetra3 plate solver from European Space Agency if i can find some free time to run the software and test it with JetsonSky.
It would be useful for me to be retired but unfortunately, i will have to wait for my 67th anniversary. Still 9 years to wait.
I downloaded one of the moon images, but I don’t know of a name. Downloading them just gives a file name with what looks like a huge checksum. Excellent work though! Quite enjoyable to watch.
a quick Moon with colors of the soils.
The color reference map was processed with JetsonSky.
The moon picture was a 2019 mosaic (quite sharp with good details).
Base map (mosaic) and color map are superimposed with classical image manipulation software.
QGIS was used to match the 2 layers.
