 Hey, everyone, Nico here. For this week's Five Minute Friday, where each Friday I delve into astrophotography topics for about five minutes, I'm gonna answer some of your questions from Instagram. So the first question is, what source of learning would you recommend for beginners? Well, everyone's a bit different in this regard. Personally, I like learning best from books and articles, you know, the written word. Others have told me they really prefer video. There's a lot of stuff out there. So it's really just about finding the teachers that you click with, whether that's me or another astrophotographer on YouTube or a blogger or an author. One of the first books I purchased that is about astrophotography, and it's still probably my favorite, is this one. It's called The Deep Sky Imaging Primer by Charles Bracken. And I just find it really clear. And I like how it delves into things and how they work, but it's really approachable with lots of illustrations. Okay, next question is, what is the most annoying pre-imaging thing that you have to do in your workflow? Well, I live on in a house, but I'm on the third floor in an apartment, and there's no elevator. So I have to walk down three flights of stairs with heavy equipment, and it takes about a dozen trips up in town to pack up the car. So on a night like tonight where the temp's over 30 degrees Celsius, it's pretty annoying because I get completely drenched and sweat. Do you have an art or music style that inspires your work in astro? That's a great question, and yes, both. For art, I'm really inspired by sort of like landscape painters and photographers, and I'll put a few images up. I mentioned this book about the Hubble images in another video, but I'll bring it up again because Elizabeth Kessler also makes some great connections between astrophotography and landscape paintings in this book. And so I really recommend it. For a music style, I like listening to like really energetic classical music, like Vivaldi, I'll add it to the video here so you can get an idea. And I listen to that while I'm editing my pictures, and it really inspires me and sort of gets the creative juices flowing for me. Okay, if you could go back in time and give your astro beginner self some advice, what would it be? It would be to spend less time and money buying and selling equipment and more time finding dark skies and shooting under them. It took me I think way too long to realize how big a difference a dark sky truly makes. I mean, a standard piece of advice I find myself giving today is before you blame the equipment, try that same equipment out under a dark sky. You'll be amazed at how big a difference it makes and it's probably not the cameras fault that you have noise, it's the light pollution. Getting a newer DSLR doesn't fix light pollution. Now, eventually I did build a setup so that I can image from the city with mono and narrow band and all that really expensive stuff. But as a beginner, I wish I'd just spent more time with simple gear under dark skies rather than making all these incremental changes to the gear, because a lot of those changes really didn't help. Okay, here's a big question. What is the meaning of astrophotography for you? Well, for me astrophotography is both a hobby. It's a hobby that I really became passionate about. I enjoy discussing it, learning new techniques, teaching other people. But I also wanna say that I see the potential of astrophotography to be a fine art. And I've been enjoying discussing this with other people. There was a presentation that Gary Lopez organized recently with J.P. Metzivanio and Gary Lopez also organizes a group over on Astrobin called Fine Art Astrophotography. I think my aspiration is really to be considered an artist whose medium is astrophotography. Now, whether I reach that ideal sooner or later, I don't know, but that's sort of what I'm reaching for is to really make artworks. Okay, let's end with a rapid fire around here. I have them all lined up. What is your age? I'm 35. What is your middle name? And my middle name is Byron. What's my dream destination for a stargazing trip? I gotta say Brazil. Then I could see the southern skies. Or do you plan to do workshops, in-person workshops? I don't have any immediate plans, but in the future, I'm not gonna rule it out maybe. That'd be really cool if I could get that organized. Favorite planet is Saturn. What do you do other than astrophotography? My day job is I'm a librarian at the Center for Astrophysics. I also have other hobbies like playing the piano and cooking and hiking and things like that. What do you do on nights that aren't clear? And I actually have a video on this. Some ideas from that video were to build a dark library, read astronomy books. And nowadays, personally, I'm often working on this YouTube channel. Hey, is it possible to get photos of deep-skite objects with a DIY tracker? Definitely. I have a video on making and using a DIY tracker. I captured the Ro Oofyuki Cloud Complex with it. And I have some future videos planned as well where I'll try out other objects and improvements to the tracker. Well, that does it for this week's Five Minute Friday. This has been Nico Carver at NebulaFotos.com. Clear skies.