Hit 500 uploads on my astrophotography account last night and it hit me different

I was just scrolling through my gallery (like I do every night before bed) and realized I crossed the 500 photo mark without even noticing. That's 500 separate nights of pointing my telescope at random patches of sky. Most of them are garbage honestly, like 300 of them are just blurry blobs of Orion that I kept trying get right. But it's wild to think I've spent that many hours alone in my yard at 2am waiting for the clouds to move. Has anyone else hit a random milestone like this and felt weirdly proud about it?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_max1mo ago

The part about "500 separate nights" really got me. That's the thing about hobbies like this, you don't notice the time passing because you're just doing your thing. I bet if you add up all those 2am hours, it's more than a full month of your life just standing in the dark looking up. It reminds me how we only really see the big picture when we step back, like how people don't notice they've read a hundred books until they stack them all up. You probably remember each blurry Orion shot too, like a little diary of bad weather and good moments. What got you into astrophotography in the first place?

mia_singh241mo ago

oh man that's such a good point about the diary thing. i got into it cause i was living in the middle of nowhere for a summer and the sky was so dark it felt like cheating not to try. my first few shots were just blobs but now i look back and can remember exactly which night i froze my toes off for that one or the time my neighbor's dog scared me half to death at 3am.