Astrophotography is an interesting hobby. It combines the very technical (the gear, the processing) with the very organic (the outdoor environment), and does so in such a way that every outing seems to render some part of your previous experience moot. 

No matter how many checklists and no matter how much preparation I make, something goes wrong every time, in a new and unexpected way. (And sometimes things go wrong in the banal and usual sort of ways, like dead batteries or unexpected clouds.) You can get hundreds of details exactly right, and miss one that makes the entire session a bust. 

One of the things that separates AP from many computer-driven activities (and AP is very much a computer-driven activity these days), is the hurry-up-and-wait nature of it. You rush to get your gear setup, turned on, pointed, calibrated, cards emptied, etc. But then, you just wait. Hours and hours, often. Sitting in the dark, hoping the gear you setup is doing what it's supposed to. 

You can fiddle with it, of course, and often I do. But eventually you have to resign yourself to the inevitable: you've done what you can, and what will be, will be. 

So, you sit in your chair and bask in the glory of the heavens, and in the dark silence of the night sky. You hear the birds, chatting to each other before they settle in for the night. Then, the critters come out and live the lives we usually never consider. The smells of night are lifted up on the breeze. The heat of the day seeps out of the earth around you. Quiet and unhurried, the world spins, and you must wait. 

All of which leads to one of the great (and delightful) ironies of Astrophotography for me: in setting out to explore and capture the vast and distant universe, it is the sublime of the world around me that leaves me reeling.