Astrophotography

I think almost everyone at some point of his life, had been fascinated of what lies outside our little planet, wondering what else lies in our solar system. How many marvels are hidden in our galaxy, or even beyond? I have always been fascinated by space, but actually I haven't even considered the idea ( until recently ) of buying a telescope. People often think its an expensive hobby ( which is in part true ), and what can be achieved by a single person is very limited ( watch the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn ... and that's about it ), but i discovered that modern telescopes ( even "small" ones  ) with a camera attached, allows you to take pictures of thousand, tens of thousands of deep sky objects. They are so many that are enough for a lifetime.

Astrophotography its the art of "taking photos" of the sky. It can be a landscape taken by night with the milky what shining in the sky with a standard DSLR camera, or taking pictures with a telescope of objects located hundreds light years away.
One of the biggest difference compared to  visual astronomy, its the heavy usage of a computer to take pictures, to control the mount so the scope follows the sky rotation, to control the focus. Even once taken all the pictures, its just half of the work done. Now we need several programs to "merge" all the pictures taken and try to get the most from them.

On one side, astrophotography have the ability to gather light for hours, so can make visible objects so faint that normally cannot be seen with naked eye, or  even by visual astronomy. On the other hand, it requires dedicated hardware, a very precise setup, and a good knowledge of the many tools ( hardware and software ) used. Last thing you want is to capture photos for a whole night, just to discover in the morning that the telescope slowly dragged away from the subject you wanted to capture, or to discover that all the pictures are slightly out of focus.