Hey, and welcome.
Deep Sky Creations started as a place to put my own astrophotography online and slowly turned into something bigger — a catalog of every Messier and NGC object worth pointing a camera at, an APOD archive, and now this: a place for the rest of us to actually talk about it.
A few things to know:
- Show your work. Show & Tell is for posting captures. Long captures, short captures, phone-through-the-eyepiece captures, all of it. The point is to make this place feel alive — share what you shot last night even if it's a noisy, half-cooked stack.
- Ask the dumb questions. Help & Critique is for that. There's no such thing as a dumb question in this hobby. I've been at this for years and I still have to look up which way to turn the focuser.
- Talk gear. Equipment is for what you shoot with, what you wish you shot with, and the saga of the mount you returned three times before getting the right one.
- Observing reports are welcome too — what you saw, when, where, and how it went. Backyard sessions count. Driveway sessions count. Bortle 9 sessions where you spent two hours imaging through a single hole in the clouds count especially.
A few light rules:
- Be kind. This is supposed to be fun.
- No spam, no self-promo without context, no AI-generated "art" passed off as captures.
- Disagree freely, but go after the idea, not the person.
- New accounts can post in Show & Tell and Off-topic right away. The other categories unlock after a few posts or a few days — keeps the bots out without making you fill out a form.
The site is small and hand-built and will stay that way. If something breaks, post about it in Off-topic and I'll fix it. If you want a feature, same place. This is a community of one currently — let's see what it becomes.
Clear skies.
— Mike