Visual astronomy versus astrophotgraphy

Recently, I watched yet another YouTube amateur astronomer introduce his series of astrophotography "how-to" videos. There is a plethora of such videos on YouTube. They're all well done. I can't complain about the quality of their information or the quality of their productions, but one thing I always gripe about (if only to myself) is their dismissal of visual (regarded as old-fashioned) astronomy. 

Astrophotography has gained quite a following since the invention of the digital camera, the auto-guider, and the Go-To telescope. I might also include, since the invention of the "smart telescopes," like the Unistellar, SeeStar, Dwarf, and Celestron's Origin. All of these inventions can be compared to AI tech. They have removed much of the work and, sadly, the human talent and understanding from traditional astrophotography. 

The computer is the lowest common denominator to astrophotography in the "smart era." Computer algorithms have invaded all of the areas of modern amateur astronomy that used to require skill and knowledge on the part of the amateur astronomer. We used to have to aim our telescopes by hand at our celestial targets, and we used to have to guide our hours-long exposures by hand. We used to also develop our film and print our own pictures in the darkroom. 

Nowadays, self-pointing telescopes and autoguiders have made astrophotography so easy that backyard astronomers don't even have to be present while their telescopes acquire images of deep-sky objects all night long. Yeah. Today's astrophotographers get everything set up at the beginning of the night and then go to sleep while their robots literally "do their hobby for them." And computer software corrects all of the blemishes in their images, whether it be bloated star images, image noise from underexposure, or color imbalance.

It's the "easy button" approach to astrophotography that has created a divide between today's astrophotographers and the "back in the day" astrophotographers, who did everything the hard way. Unfortunately, this divide can be summed up as a fight between "the old guys" and "the newbies." Today's astrophotography newbies categorically decry the old guys and their insistence upon the importance of following the rules of old-fashioned backyard astronomy. And the old guys just shake their heads and say, "Kids these days...."

When one considers the difficulty of old-fashioned backyard astrophotography compared to modern astrophotography, it is no wonder that newbies laugh at the old guys. Why in the world would anybody want to go back to emulsion films and "dumb" telescopes that had to be pointed and guided by hand? A similar argument can be made for land navigation. Why would anybody want to go back to paper road maps, when modern GPS-based programs like Google Maps and Apple Maps, using voiced commands, can tell you when to turn left or right, and which lane to be in, as you drive from one town to the next?

However, I would argue that the old-guy vs newbie astrophotography argument is significantly different than the land navigation argument. After all, people who use the voiced navigation assistance in Google Maps and Apple Maps, have at least been educated about the layout of the world in public schools. They have seen and become familiar with globes and maps of the world. Their base knowledge of geography (with country and state boundaries) has already given them a sense of where they live in comparison to their destination. So, voiced GPS navigation just makes it easier for them to get from point A to point B. 

But that is not the case with astronomy. Our public-school education does not teach us the constellations. When we look up into the night sky, we have no background or working knowledge of how to navigate across the stars. The sad truth is that many of us don't know where our "home" is in the Milky Way galaxy, and we don't even know where our "home" is in the solar system. Most of us don't understand the framework of earth's orbit around the sun. Moreover, while many of us have become familiar with latitude and longitude, thanks to GPS, far fewer of us have had any exposure to Right Ascension and Declination, which are fundamental to our navigation through the night sky. As a matter of fact, many of us don't even know what's out there in deep space! What is a star cluster, a nebula, a galaxy? What is a quasar, a nova, a supernova? What is a variable star, a double star, a carbon star? What is a planet, an asteroid, a comet, a meteor?

Since we weren't taught about these things in school (or anywhere else), don't you think it would be prudent for us to educate ourselves about the fundamentals of astronomy before we launch into a hobby of taking pictures of outer space? Should we not wish to be knowledgeable about our subjects? Should we not desire to be subject matter experts? 

The YouTuber I mentioned at the top of this page made a few comments that I'd like to discuss here, in hopes of clarifying my arguments about this topic.

Specifically, the YouTuber said, "Astrophotography has little to do with visual astronomy." He besmirched the fact that the "old guys" will tell you that you should get started in this hobby the old-fashioned way, with a telescope that does NOT have Go-To capabilities, and that backyard astronomers should first become familiar with all of the constellations and the 50 brightest stars in the sky and develop the skill to aim their telescopes by hand when tracking down deep-sky objects. He said that the old guys would say that only after learning the brightest constellations and 50 brightest stars should you buy a telescope. And after buying a telescope, you should spend considerable time observing the planets and the brightest deep-sky objects through the telescope eyepiece before delving into the more difficult art of astrophotography. To all of this, he simply said, "Nope!" He then added, "That would be a complete waste of money and time." As he unboxed a beautiful 9.25-inch Celestron telescope, he scoffed at the included star diagonal and eyepiece, laid them aside, and said, "I'll probably never use these."

In his words, you can forego all of that old-fashioned visual astronomy and "you won't miss a lot."

Hmmm. You won't miss a lot. Well, of course I must disagree! 

I got my start in backyard astronomy in 1980, when we didn't have PCs or the internet or smartphones or Go-To telescopes! We used paper star charts to learn the brightest stars and constellations in the night sky. But my argument here goes far beyond the notion that "since I suffered, you must also suffer." No! It is much, much more than that! When I caught the backyard astronomy bug in 1980, I wasn't just trying to take the shortest path to taking beautiful pictures of celestial objects. My curiosity about the night sky drove me to buy books that taught me the history of telescopic astronomy. 

I learned first about Galileo, in 1609, pointing his tiny refractor at the moon and discovering that it was covered with things that no one had ever seen before, so there wasn't even a word for them! Galileo named them "craters," or "cups." He also aimed his telescope at Jupiter and discovered it was not just a "star" but that it could be magnified into a disk. And it had four bright moons orbiting around it. Galileo also aimed his telescope at Saturn and discovered its "ears," or "rings." He discovered that Venus had phases like the moon, and that the Seven Sisters (the Pleiades cluster) were a group of more than 50 stars, rather than the mere 7 stars that the ancients had observed. He used his telescope to scan the Milky Way and saw that it was made up of tiny stars that were not resolvable by the naked eye. With a small telescope in his back garden, Galileo had single-handedly overturned centuries of misguided beliefs and thoughts about the universe.

I had learned about Galileo in school. But I didn't know or understand anything about his astronomical observations. So, I bought a small refractor telescope and rediscovered all those things that Galileo observed! I saw the same craters on the moon that he saw. I observed the four moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and the phases of Venus. I was blown away by my first view of the Pleiades cluster through the eyepiece of my small telescope. I had never been able to see more than 6 stars in the Pleiades, but my telescope revealed dozens of stars! 

Next, I learned about Edmond Halley, who studied comets and discovered that, instead of being mysterious and unpredictable atmospheric phenomena, they are solar system bodies that orbit the sun just like the planets do. After looking at troves of historical data on comets, Halley suggested that one comet in particular was orbiting the sun with a period of 76 years and he predicted that it would return in 1758, long after his own death. Furthermore, he calculated where it would appear and in 1758, amateur astronomers like Charles Messier would search for it and find it. But while looking for Halley's Comet, Charles Messier came across 110 (or so) deep-sky objects, most of which were not seen by Galileo, and also were not comets!

I got to "recover" Halley's Comet with my 8-inch reflector telescope and 35mm SLR film camera in 1985, right in my own back yard! It was thrilling to repeat the observations of Johann Georg Palitzsch, who was the first to find Halley's Comet on Christmas Day of 1758, using the coordinates published by Edmond Halley.

In addition to looking at and photographing Halley's Comet, I used that same telescope, an Edmund Scientific 8-inch fork-mounted reflector, to search for and observe many of Charles Messier's 110 deep-sky objects. During those years in the mid 1980s, I also read about William Herschel's discovery of the planet Uranus and thousands of deep-sky objects. In the following decades, I would hunt down those objects, too. 

As a young man, less than 20 years old, in my own back yard under the cover of darkness on clear nights, I followed in the footsteps of Galileo, Edmond Halley, Charles Messier, and William Herschel! It was amazing! I witnessed firsthand what nebulae, star clusters, and galaxies looked like through the eyepiece of my telescope. All by myself, I learned how to use star charts and equatorial coordinates to track down faint and fuzzy objects that were invisible to my unaided eyes. The bright stars and constellations became my familiar friends in the night sky.

During those years, I also read about Edwin Hubble discovering Cepheid variables in Messier 31, proving that it was no mere nebula, but rather it was a remote island of stars just like our Milky Way. And I went out with my telescope and looked directly at M 31 with my own eyes. I traced its dark dust lanes and satellite galaxies M 32 and M 110 by simply looking through the eyepiece!

My first views of the Andromeda Galaxy, M 31, the Dumbbell Nebula, M 27, the Ring Nebula, M 57, and the Great Orion Nebula, M 42, were colorless through the eyepiece of my telescope. But there were faint whisps of nebulosity, sparkling stars, and dark lanes. As I peered through the eyepiece, I knew that with my modern technology, I was seeing these objects with more clarity than Messier and Herschel ever saw them!

After a few years, I began to dabble in film astrophotography, and that was when I first saw color in deep-sky objects. I couldn't believe my eyes. All of these things that I had seen only in black-and-white through the eyepiece suddenly looked just like the color pictures of them I had seen in Sky & Telescope and Astronomy magazines. With my own gear, I proved to myself that the color was "real." 

For years I had read that science was about repeating independent observations. If you write down your observations in a journal, recording all of the details of your instruments (telescope aperture and focal length, film type, exposure length, etc.), then others can independently repeat your observations with similar instruments and verify your results. My backyard observations were powerful proofs of the scientific method.  

Think about this: We can, in 2025, follow in the footsteps of Galileo, Halley, Messier, Herschel, and Hubble! We can re-learn classical astronomy with simple instruments right in our own back yards. We can learn science. We can do science. And we can do this without Go-To telescopes and without astrophotography. 

After experiencing and witnessing all of these things as a backyard astronomer over the past 40 years, how can I keep my silence when some 20-something YouTuber says, "You can start out in astrophotography without having done any visual astronomy and you won't miss much"?  

Please. Let me be clear. When old guys like me warn you against bypassing Astronomy 101, it's not because we're salty. Go ahead. Cut to the chase. Skip the hard parts of backyard astronomy. Google the Cliff's Notes and download your equipment recipe so that you can start taking stunning astrophotos immediately. Make your unboxing video and then, on that same night, launch right into your first attempt at a Hubble Palette version of the Elephant Trunk Nebula. Good for you!

All I'm saying is that when you go to post it to your Instagram, you'll be at a loss to say anything intelligible about the subject of your picture, because you never learned anything about it. And you'll do what all the other newbs do and just copy and paste a few descriptive paragraphs about the subject of your picture from Wikipedia. 

It doesn't have to be that way! 

Take it from me, one of those "old guys." Get your start in backyard astronomy the right way by following in the footsteps of Galileo, Messier, and Herschel. One thing that's missing from the history books is how guys like Galileo or Messier learned their way around the sky. Did you ever stop to think about how Galileo knew which "star" was Jupiter and which star was Saturn? Who taught him the stars and constellations? He had to learn about those things prior to making his astronomical discoveries. Did his parents point out Praesepe and the Pleiades to him when he was a child? Or did he only learn the night sky later in life, after the invention of the telescope? Was it not until he looked at the moon through his telescope for the first time? And perhaps, after studying the moon, did he then wonder how his telescope would perform on the planets and stars?

Although you may already have become spoiled by the stunning celestial imagery available on the internet and from large, coffee table books on astronomy, you can still personally relive the "A-ha!" discoveries of Galileo, Messier, and Herschel. Just beyond the doorstep to your back yard. But you need to learn your way around the sky first. These days, that's much easier to do than it was for those ancient telescopists. Use a smartphone or purchase a planisphere and a star atlas like Sky & Telescope's Pocket Star Atlas and become familiar with the constellations and the 50 brightest stars of the night sky before you buy your first telescope. Buy a pair of 8 x 42 binoculars and practice aiming them at the moon and some of the brighter deep-sky objects, like the Orion Nebula and the Pleiades star cluster. Purchase a "starter book" on astronomy, like Terence Dickinson's Nightwatch, that can show you how to find celestial objects. Also, get your hands on a copy of Burnham's Celestial Handbook or Annals of the Deep-Sky and read about your celestial targets before you go outside to look at them. Understand what you're looking at and then learn the ropes of aiming, looking through, and focusing your binoculars on your targets. 

When you're comfortable using binoculars, you'll find it to be an easy transition when you eventually decide to upgrade to a small telescope. And when you decide to purchase a telescope, don't spend a lot of money on it. Get yourself a small refractor like Explore Scientific's FirstLight AR80 (US$159). Start out by observing the moon and the bright planets through the eyepiece. Find out how Saturn's rings and Jupiter's cloud belts and moons looked to Galileo. After that, move on to the dimmer deep-sky objects. Find out how globular cluster M 13 looked to Charles Messier when he first observed it on June 1, 1764. 

Sure, you could start your journey with a more expensive and sophisticated telescope, and you could use a Go-To mount or planetarium PC software to make M 13 one of your astrophotography targets, without even knowing where it is in the night sky. You can program your telescope and camera to take long exposures of M 13 through multiple filters. You can set it all up and then go to bed and not even see what your telescope and camera are doing in the middle of the night while you're fast asleep. Following online instructions, you can wake up the next morning and spend hours processing your pictures of M 13. But who knows? Maybe after spending all that time and money, you'll be disappointed in your results and feel frustrated by the complicated equipment and software. Maybe you bit off more than you can chew. Maybe now you'll feel like backyard astronomy isn't for you and you're going to lose some money trying to sell back all that expensive gear you bought.

© 1977, The Emund Sky Guide

Here's where you win by starting out inexpensive and simple. I think that you will appreciate M 13 much more if you begin by using your star chart to locate it in the "Keystone" of Hercules. Then, on a clear summer night, go out and look for the Hercules constellation in the night sky, by finding the Keystone with your unaided eyes. Take a look at M 13 through your binoculars and your first impression probably will be that it looks like a small, hazy blob, slightly bigger than the stars surrounding it in your field of view. And when you aim your cheap little 80 mm (3-inch) telescope at it, you'll be blown away when you look into the eyepiece and see a large fuzzball! If you can get excited about that, then you've passed the test! Maybe now you'll find it worthwhile to spend more money on a better telescope. Spoiler alert: a 4-inch aperture scope will resolve M 13 into stars, and a larger aperture (say, 6-inch or 8-inch SCTs and reflectors) will brighten the view and show many more stars than you can see with a 4-inch scope.

To go back to the road map analogy that I mentioned earlier, you have two choices when it comes to finding and looking at celestial objects in the night sky. First, you could choose to buy a paper chart and navigate to your destination with your eyes on the sky, in which case, you become very familiar and knowledgeable about its location. Or, you can use Go-To or PC software to aim your telescope and take a picture with your camera, in which case, you probably won't remember where the object is in the sky, and you will have no idea what it looks like in the eyepiece. If you don't learn and memorize the stars and constellations, you won't have an appreciation for where celestial objects "live," as in their celestial habitats.

Imagine for a moment that you never looked at a map of the world or learned about the continents, countries, or state boundaries. You would have no sense of where you are on the globe compared to everything else. And one day you might hear about some exotic place that you'd like to visit, like the Grand Canyon in Arizona. If you were familiar with a map of the United States, and you knew the rough outlines of the 50 states, and if you knew your home location, you would understand immediately how far away Arizona is from you, how long it would take you to get there, whether you needed to take an airplane or if it would be an easy drive in your car.

Similarly, if you never paid any attention to the stars and constellations, but one day in your reading you came across an interesting celestial object in Carina, the Keel of Argo Navis, that you'd love to see with your telescope, the home of your potential target is lost to you. Carina means nothing to you. It's just one of those "stupid ancient mythological constellations that we shouldn't have to learn about!" But it is a rather important piece of information to the amateur astronomer! Is Carina a constellation in the northern or southern hemisphere? Can you go out tonight and look at it from your back yard, or is that a constellation for a different season? Certainly, you could use your smartphone or PC to help you sort it all out, but if that doesn't happen until later, you may have gotten your heart set on seeing and photographing this potential target, and by the time you figure out that it isn't observable from your location, it might be very disappointing. If you already knew that you don't live in the correct hemisphere to view Carina, you would have immediately dismissed the possibility of shooting that target and saved yourself from the letdown.

Frankly, as an old guy who got his start in the hobby the old-fashioned way, I can't understand why in the world anybody would want to skip the rich history of observational astronomy and just launch into a hobby where you buy a robot to take pictures of celestial objects that you know absolutely nothing about. Not only that, but think about it: if you follow the same recipe that everyone else is using to buy equipment and get into astrophotography, your pictures are going to look identical to everyone else's. What's the point? Why spend all that money and time just to get a picture that looks identical to the ones that you can find on the internet? 

If you want to make your backyard astronomy experience meaningful and personal, do not begin your journey by leaping right into astrophotography. Save that part for later. Start your journey at the beginning by getting to know the night sky, intimately. Learn the bright stars and constellations so that when you go out at night and look up, they are so familiar to you that you can call them by name without having to look at your smartphone or your star charts. 

Celestial objects are like people. At first, they are all strangers to you. What's the point of taking pictures of strangers? Strangers hold no special meaning for you. You first need to make their acquaintance so that they become familiar to you. The next step is to get to know them, so that they become your friends. And it is your friends that you'll want to take pictures of, so that you can cherish their memories when the passing seasons take them away from you temporarily. In a few months, they'll return again, and you'll welcome them back. You'll share a few drinks with them and talk and laugh and cry over all the things that have happened in your life since you last saw them.

That YouTuber who said, "You can skip all of that and not miss much" doesn't understand backyard astronomy at all.