Last week , I went to France and last saturday down near the french border (in Belgium) at a public star party, we were very lucky with the weather (we could see the Milky Way) but I was less with the camera.

I learned several things....

Amateurs are more and more often returning back to the simple pleasure of star gazing rather than spending a lot of time taking pictures and processing them.

This is why the Dobson becomes very popular !!

A way to aim at specific objects without a goto would be a sort of "pushto" using digital setting circles. A telescope is linked to a PC and is manually aimed. While it moves, its aim appears as a cross on the PC screen. The cross moves on the screen (as the scope moves) and on the screen there are various points that are stars or planets. The trick is to move the scope so that the cross matches a star. That way, we could see planets and stars in full daylight. Once the matching works, a motor should start working so that the scope remains on the target (it wasn't the case with my friend as it was a viewer).

I don't have a good eyesight (I always remove my glasses to look through an eyepiece) and this affects my ability to perfectly focus on an object. Even the Canon's LCD screen with Live view doesn't fully help. Some say I should then use a portable PC screen to increase the image's size...Then, well, why not just observe with the eyes....and not make photography a priority.