Ditch the single long exposure and go with stacking. I was a 60 second single shot guy for years, but after trying 15 four second exposures stacked in Sequator, the difference in star sharpness is night and day. You get way less trailing, way less noise, and the final detail is just cleaner, especially for printing. Plus you can push the ISO higher without ruining the image, which helps pick up faint dust lanes in the Milky Way. Just make sure you shoot with a fast lens and track your alignment across the stack, or you'll get weird artifacts in the final merge.

Oh man, three hours is nothing-I’ve spent two days fighting a nail before giving up and crying.

oh man, "fleshed it out for hours only for the lead writer to nix the whole thing" hit way too close to home. spent three days rewriting a villain's backstory that got axed in ten seconds cause the showrunner "wasn't feeling it.

omg that is horrible... something similar happened to me back in 2019 with a service called PhotoVault. I had all my college graduation pictures and a video of my grandmother's 80th birthday on there and then one day the app just stopped loading... I kept getting error messages for like a week before I finally googled it and found out the company had gone bankrupt. I still feel sick thinking about that video being gone forever.

You know, I used to be one of those people who thought "the radiation belt argument just doesn't hold up" was totally correct. I actually believed the whole faking thing for a couple years because I saw some slick YouTube video with fancy graphics. But then I sat down and looked at the actual numbers from the Apollo missions myself, not just the cherry-picked stuff conspiracy people love. The math on how they got through the Van Allen belts checks out if you factor in the speed and path they took. It was a real eye opener for me, and now I feel kind of silly for doubting it so hard.