Light Pollution

It is half past two. My hands are stiff with cold, there is dew on the tube, the battery is draining faster than it should. Another raw sub appears on the screen — grey, ugly, full of noise — and for a second I can see in it what is not visible yet: the shape that will come out of the dark after ten hours of integration. That one second is why I am here.

For years I thought the weather was the hardest part of all this.

It is not.

Light that does not come from the sky

Light pollution has one nasty property: it does not destroy the signal. It drowns it. Photons from a galaxy millions of light years away still reach the sensor, they are still written into the file — they just sink into a glow that came from below. From the ground. From a street lamp by the road, from somebody's back yard.

Jealousy works in exactly the same way.

It does not take your skill away. It does not erase your nights, your hours spent on calibration, the rig you put together over years out of savings. It only raises the background so high that you stop seeing your own signal. You take the best frame of your life, and the first thought that arrives is not “it worked”. It is: “I wonder what he will say about this”.

A gradient can be subtracted. A person cannot.

A copy with no photons

I have to say this honestly, or I would simply be ridiculous: in astrophotography we all shoot the same things. M31 has one place in the sky. Nobody invented the North America Nebula and nobody owns Orion. If someone points a telescope at the same object I did, that is not copying. That is the hobby.

Copying begins somewhere else.

It begins when someone takes not the object but the decisions. The framing I spent three seasons looking for. The palette I tuned for weeks, because in the standard one everything looked like plastic. The order of processing steps I described publicly, because I believed that sharing was the whole point of this community. Sometimes even the sentences — my sentences, pasted over with the word order nudged.

A photograph is not the object. A photograph is the sum of the choices. When someone takes the choices, they are not taking your file — they are taking the road you walked to reach it. And I paid for that road in frost, in mistakes, in burnt nights and in gear that failed at the worst possible moment.

A copy looks the same. It just has no photons in it. None of those nights.

A mount aligned by eye

Friendships in this hobby start beautifully. Nothing brings people together like standing in a field at four in the morning, one thermos between the two of you, and someone else's cable saving your entire session. You get to know a person not by what they say, but by how they behave when it is going badly for both of you.

And then comes the night when it goes well for only one of you.

That is when it turns out the friendship was standing like a mount aligned by eye: on short exposures it tracks flawlessly. Only when the integration time gets long does the drift show. The stars begin to trail in one direction. Not all at once — at first it is just a slight elongation, something you can explain away as seeing, as tiredness, as chance.

Later it cannot be explained away.

The tone of the messages changes. The comment that was always under your photo stops appearing. A question about gear stops being a question and becomes an inventory. Someone who was recently glad about your good frame starts counting your frames and setting them against their own. And suddenly it is no longer two people talking about the sky. It is a ranking that nobody officially entered you into.

What it was doing to me

I am not going to play tough here, because in a text about honesty that would be the worst possible lie.

My psyche is fragile. It always has been. Astrophotography was the place where that fragility did not get in the way — the sky does not judge, does not take offence, does not reply in half-words. For years it was the only thing that genuinely quieted me down.

And then I started checking. Refreshing. Counting. Opening other people's profiles before my own. Opening my own photograph and seeing not a nebula but the number underneath it. There were nights when I carried the gear outside not because I wanted to, but because I had to prove something. There were months when I published nothing, because I already knew how it would be received and by whom it would be repeated.

That is exactly the moment when a hobby stops healing and starts eating.

I am not ashamed to write this. I would be ashamed if I pretended it had not touched me.

Dark frame

In processing we have calibration frames. A dark frame is taken with the shutter closed, in complete darkness — not in order to photograph anything, but in order to see what the sensor adds all by itself. How much of what you see in the image never came from the sky at all.

I took a dark frame of myself. I sat in the dark and asked one question: what here is mine, and what was added to me?

The answer was not comforting, but it was clean.

The pain was mine. The cause was not. The sensitivity is mine and it stays, because without it I would not take these pictures at all — the same thin skin that makes someone else's dishonesty hurt is what lets me sit eight hours on an object I can barely see. But the fact that someone knowingly used that sensitivity as a lever is no longer a flaw of mine. That is someone else's choice.

I do not consent to this

And here the text stops being tender.

I do not consent to this. Not in the form of a row, not in the form of a thread with twenty screenshots, not in the form of explaining myself to anyone. In the form of a boundary that simply exists.

I will not explain my decisions to people who treat them as a shopping list.
I will not hand my work to people who turned sharing into procurement.
I will not publish in order to win — winning was never part of this hobby, it was glued on by people who could not stand someone next to them getting it right.
And I will not keep pretending I cannot tell when kindness is only a form of reconnaissance.

A few people have lost their entry here. There is nothing left here for them — not in my head, not in my messages, not in my process. Not because I hate them. I do not hate them. What I have for them is distance.

Distance is not revenge. Distance is protection — exactly the kind you drive a hundred kilometres out of the city for, so that you can finally see something that cannot be seen from the back yard.

A closed door is not aggression. It is a condition of seeing.

What remains

The photons that will land on my sensor from M31 tonight set out two and a half million years ago. They left before anyone called them photons, before the word “jealousy” existed, before we existed. They travelled through a void with no rankings, no precedence and no question of “who did it first”.

And at the end of that road they hit my sensor. Mine. On this particular night that I chose, through gear I put together myself, in a frame I found myself.

Nobody can copy that from me, because it is not in the file.

The sky is big enough for everyone. My list does not have to be.