But look! A telescope! Look down the eyepiece with the telescope centered at the Great Orion Nebula.
There, in the eyepiece there are greyish streaks of dust.
Like clouds around stars. You know what you’re suppose to see. What it looks like in textbooks. This is less...
Even with a big telescope at your disposal it is not much more then a smudge.
So, you have been standing in awe with the stars shining down on you. Ancestral stories and imagination suddenly start to make sense. The constellations do form shapes around you and appear to be trusty, never changing companions through the ages.
The eyepiece comes off and an attachment for a normal DSLR camera takes it's place. A refocus routine and then an exposure of a few seconds is started. 20 seconds at 1600 iso to frame the scene and check so the focus looks good.
20 seconds... and at the back of the camera a picture appears. And there it is. What you where looking for. What you where expecting to see. Colour of red and purple. You have done it. You have pictured in colour what till this point had only been captured, with any result worth mentioning, by the Hubble space telescope! And now you!
That’s what it feels like anyway. First time the colour comes of that screen at the back of the simple camera. It's magic. The wonders of nature, far greater and grander then anything imaginable on earth is revealed.
Now this is a material sport. Of astronomical proportions. Take a look at your car. What's the price of that? That's a finger pointer to what you'll be spending on astronomical equipment now.
But no reason to be discouraged. This is really the case of most hobbies. Besides, surely you can control yourself from doing any silly shopping, yeah?