AffinityJules

Good heaven's above! You've made beautiful look more beautiful.

Cripes! If this is what you can produce when you're bored, then I'm all for seeing what you produce when you're interested.

Thanks RIck G.

I've always been a Chess player as far back as I can remember. This picture is a fanciful acknowledgement of that.

Yes. . .things have definitely come on - in leaps and bounds. I sold all my kit years ago; the age old scenario: boy meets girl/marriage beckons/need of money/sell every non-essential possession/divorce/looks backward at what might have been. These days I am left with a Sony A550 and not much else. The interest is still there - all my life in fact, but the great divider now is time, or lack of it. I will bear your suggestion in mind for future reference, and seek some technical advice from my brother (who is a photographer).

Ah. . .so you've travelled with your equipment in tow. And yes, the equator is an ideal place to see the planets. In my youth I didn't have the wherewithal to mount such expeditions so I became restricted to the UK and had to settle for Astronomy classes in night school gathering as much knowledge as I could. The worst obstacle I came across when star gazing was light pollution - so the milky-way. . .no chance! Your images of the Sun take me back to the time when I purchased my first Sun filter and began observing what I could see, I didn't get the detail you have here but I did get to see Sun spots for the first time. Great pictures as always, and I look forward to seeing more of your archived material.

I think the settings can be found in the Preferences panel under Performance. Here you can set a file recovery interval. Go to EDIT/Preferences to see this option. I have never touched this function so in that sense I never set anything up; the first time I had a crash, I restarted Affinity and the dialogue box just appeared all by itself. I'm none the wiser but it sure has saved me lots of times. The best policy for me now is to regularly save my work, regardless.

I used photoshop 7 for years and can remember it crashing all the time; never did get to the bottom of it. I bought Affinity Photo after I trialled it and thought my crashing/freezing days were done, but no, I get crashes all the time at certain instances of application. I am no technical whizz or anything like that, so I have to rely heavily on the recovery file function - this has saved me lots of times from losing hours of work. I have 'faith' in the program and really like it (when it behaves itself) but these days bugs get everywhere until the time comes that they are squished. I've sent reports off in the hope that these crashing issues will eventually be solved.

Krita? Never heard of it, but then again, I presume I haven't heard of lots of software related things. Lovely rendition.

It might help now, but 40+ years ago those gadgets didn't exist.

Apart from all these 'deep field' images - which are remarkable in themselves, do you ever train your equipment on the planets? I once had telescopes and all the fuzz that goes with it, but finding the planets was a right sod unless you knew (obviously) the exact point amongst the constellations in which to find them. I had limited success but boy! It was fascinating to say the least.

Haha! Nor anything else come to think of it.

Imagination is as imagination does. I think Affinity has become my muse - allowing me to realise dreams in picture form.

Thanks, Kasper-V. Yes, inspiration is a fickle thing and I like Terry Pratchett's interpretation of it. I end up creating pictures that I never imagined when I began them. Oh. . .hang on! here comes another neutrino.

How on earth do you keep track of all the paths/curves? Looks like Spaghetti Junction from my point of view.