Hello All,
This is going to be controversial as I know you all have dedicated a ton of time to this hobby and been in the trenches learning PI/Siril/etc. That is hard work and I appreciate you all and don’t want this post or my workflow to lessen the value of that.
That being said: I have cheated my way into the hobby and this is my story.
I have been a huge fan of astronomy since I was a kid. I remember going to the planetarium and being mesmerized by the cosmos. In high school in Santa Fe a teacher of mine did a star party at a friends house with his 10” reflector and I was blown away but what we could see. 20 years ago I bought myself a telescope, a mount and some eyepieces. I used it once or twice and it sat in my garage in a bunch of pelican cases.
Fast forward to a few months ago, my friend and neighbor (who’s fairly prolific on here, but I’ll let him decide if he wants to comment) asked if I wanted to see C/2025 A6 (Lemmon). He pulled out his telescope and it was really cool. I thought: hey I have one of those things, I should take it out and set it up. So I did and put my Canon on it with a t-mount and took some (really bad) photos.
It sparked some insane thing in me. I decided I wanted to do this for reals. I did some research and figured out my best bang for my buck would be to buy some cement and build a pier. I found this great article https://tucsonastronomy.org/astronomy/backyard-pier/ and convinced my boss (wife) to let me build it on our backyard hill. (photos here: https://eecue.com/collections/albums_2026-astrophotography)
I decided I needed a real camera, I was going to buy a color one but my aforementioned friend set me straight and sent me a link to a camera + filter wheel combo on Astromart which I procured. I also picked up a guide scope and camera, focuser, and power box all used and negotiated down because i’m cheap. I bought a fanless computer and ran power and ethernet up to my pier.
I noted that I’m cheap, I’m also not a fan of Windows, I have been a software engineer for over 30 years so I wanted everything to be on Linux and/or Mac. Here’s where it gets controversial.
I have two young children (1.5 and 3.5 year olds) and I have very very limited free time. I do not have the time required to learn a whole new workflow and complicated (and dare I say, not great UI/UX) software applications to process my photos. I am also a big fan of agentic coding and use it extensively so I decided to vibe code my way through astrophotography.
I used Claude to help dial in Kstars/Indi/Ekos. Once I started getting subs I had Claude write me a python processing script that drove Siril as well as some ML models directly to handle the stacking and processing. My workflow is currently as follows:
1) Select targets in Kstars (I also vibe coded an macOS app that shows me all the targets available with nice photos/etc so I can make good decisions on what I want to capture)
2) Go to sleep
3) Wake up
4) Run an rsync command to get my new subs onto my M1 Macbook Pro
5) Tell Claude about what I captured
6) Claude runs the scripts and opens up the processed photos in Preview
7) If i’m happy (which for the last few captures I have been) I copy them to Photos which uploads them to my website (via another vibe coded workflow)
8) I tell Claude to upload them to Astrobin
9) Sometimes I post to reddit too
That’s it, it’s roughly 1-2 minutes of my time total.
I’m shocked at what I’ve been able to capture in my bortle 9 (according to the site but I think i’m likely a bit closer to an 8) … i’ve been having a ton of fun with this, recently added an all sky camera and bought a new mount (Losmandy G11 which I got for a steal with all the nice upgrades) … next up is getting a bigger scope so I can enjoy galaxies.
I do want to remind folks that this hobby should be fun, so please be gentle to a noob.
Happy to answer any questions. I am unable to open source my code though since my work prohibits that.
