u/nilss2

Picture 1: Generic A7 notepad with cover from AliExpress, costed less than 3 EUR, lasts me months already. The cover has a pen loop and card slots (normally for business cards). I use it as my wallet, and like that I can easily take notes. I've printed the barcode of an often used customer loyalty card on a sticker and stuck it on the wallet. There is another one on the back.

Picture 2: my EDC: Mudita Kompakt minimalist phone, wallet notebook, small key pouch with cash and coins.

25 years ago I was in an amateur astronomy club for youngsters specialising in astrophotography, while most other clubs wisely stuck to visual observing. We photographed on film, using SLRs with telephoto lenses piggy-backing on a tracking scope. We guided manually by eyepiece (exposure time per frame could be hours). Found our objects manually using paper star charts. Scopes powered by a car battery. Film rolls of 36 frames yielding a few successful shots of a fuzzy blob (but sharp stars, hooray!). We were absolutely insane masochists. It's a miracle I got married.

Now I have 4 young kids, a full-time job, and zero time to sit outside for hours at night cursing my gear under a dim red light. I turned my back to the hobby and turned a page in my life, so I thought.

Enter the smart telescopes. It was inevitable, in the end. Before we eventually disbanded our club 20 years ago because life happened, already the go-to mounts and ccd cameras made their appearance. Photoshop. Stacking. One of the senior members said: "We are turning into a computer club, it's no longer astronomy".

I learned last year about Seestar and Dwarflabs. Took me a long time to swallow my pride and self-righteousness. "This is not astronomy!" "This is for lazy-ass dumbheads with brainrot!" "No pain no gain!" "For whom do they even produce this? Who's the target audience?!" I am the target audience, obviously. I have no time and need to sleep, but I do love fuzzy blobs at night! Figured I can still just flog myself as I put up the scope, just to feel some pain.

So my Dwarf Mini arrived yesterday, birthday gift from the wife (she didn't order a flog). Couldn't wait for first light! Conditions were far from ideal. Heat wave lead to a sensor temperature of 35°C. Slight cloud cover with thin clouds, almost full moon etc. Bortle 6.6 sky around Brussels. In the olden days we would never have taken out the equatorial mount. A Dobson, maybe. Figured I'd give it a shot but should try first in alt-az mode to get the hang of it.

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• M13, Hercules cluster
• 92 frames of 15s
• Astro filter (light pollution filter)
• Gain 60
• Automatic postprocessing in Stellar Studio, nothing else.
• Might be worth keeping the FITs and postprocess further on computer. Which means: I'll need to also learn Pixinsight or Siril or whatever.

I also tried the Eastern Vail Nebula, which succeeded, but that one needs more time.

Maybe for you guys this is a stupid pic but from my perspective: 10 minutes of work. Not a blob. Best of all: I was sleeping while the scope worked. What times we are living in!

Dwarf Mini arrived yesterday, birthday gift from the wife. Couldn't wait for first light! Conditions were far from ideal. Heat wave lead to a sensor temperature of 35°C. Slight cloud cover with thin clouds, almost full moon etc. Bortle 6.6 sky around Brussels. Figured I should try first in alt-az mode. Still, results impressed me.

1. M13, Hercules cluster. 92x15s. Automatic postprocessing in Stellar Studio, nothing else. Might be worth keeping the FITs and postprocess further on computer.

2. C33, Eastern Veil Nebula. 160x15s. Postprocessed only in Stellar Studio (automatic). I'm considering making a mosaic with the entire veil nebula.

Cool part is that the images were taken as I was sleeping, using the scheduling feature. It's actually insane if you think about it. This wasn't possible 5 years ago.

I had some hiccups, though. Dwarf mini didn't want to work at first. Turns out you cannot have the moon as your first subject, because the moon requires finding it manually, which you cannot do if the telescope is still pointing downwards and closed. I first had to find a star, only then could I go to the moon.

Also, I had to manually dial in the focus point. On automatic the stars were disks.

I'm not a real (paid) professional photographer, but I regularly shoot events for friends and family as a hobbyist. I've switched last year from Fujifilm to Lumix G because, frankly, Fujifilm is overrated and overpriced. M43 is insane value, and because I very regularly carry my camera with me, I do appreciate compactness and lightness. Wanting to get into video also, I figured Lumix is a good choice. I liked their lens line-up better than Olympus.

Last year I found a second-hand GX9 (PANASONIC WHERE IS THE GX9II???) and I absolutely adore that camera. I've actually shot a lot of events with it, using the 12-35mm f/2.8 and 35-100mm f/2.8. People even complemented me on the photos. Nobody cares about the noise in the dark photos (the little noise left after AI denoise in DxO photolab), even though if I were to shoot events every single day I'd probably get an S-series. But make no mistake: the GX9 is absolutely great for events, and these little retro rangefinder cameras attract a lot of people to the lens, the crowd is not as camera shy as with a big 'professional-looking' camera.

The only thing against the GX9 is the lack of dual card slot (I once had an SD card fail on me but I noticed in time) and the lack of microphone-in for video.

Right before an event I took the GX9 with me on a family vacation. Whilst charging, my toddlers knocked the camera of a the table and this broke the battery compartment.

PANIC. Two days left to the event, and no camera! I figured I needed a back-up, especially for video, with an audio-in.

Next day I went to a camera store. They could send the GX9 to Panasonic to fix the camera compartment, but this would take 6 weeks. Either I'd rent a camera (giving me a chance to play with the GH7) or I'd buy a new one on the spot. I really did not feel like buying a G9II, the obvious choice and in stock. It's an expensive camera, overkill for my needs, and when I got to hold it, it felt really heavy and unwieldy. I wouldn't enjoy it. Luckily, the camera store had a G97 in stock, too. This one felt right in the hand, not too heavy. The G97 was also super affordable, barely more expensive than renting a GH7 for a week. It has audio-in, audio-out, video-out (albeit micro HDMI), a flash, USB-C charging AND operation, as well as support for a vertical battery grip, something quite useful for the many portraits I do. It just misses an extra SD-card slot. So I copped it.

Very happy with it. Shots came out great. Great ergonomics, too, in general. Everything feels right in the hand. The three buttons in front for exposure compensation, iso and WB each have a different feel to them (one with dots, one indented, one 'normal'). I have the impression the camera menu system is more complicated than the GX9, though. Autofocus for photos is great, just like with the GX9. Even without the PDAF it's miles ahead of Fujifilm. XD Battery life is also great. I bought an extra battery just to be sure, but in the end I survived every day with more than 70% battery left.

The one remark against ergonomics is that I do not like the flippy screen at all. I'm very much used to tilting the screen all the time, and with a flippy screen there are too many manipulations. If ever I upgrade to a 'bigger boy' camera, which may happen in a few years if I maybe get into the limitations of the video performance (for now I don't do color grading so the 8-bit doesn't bother me), I might get a GH7 and not the G9II, just because of that damn flippy screen.