[I confess: this is a hybrid post in which I have broken the golden rule of 'knowing my audience'. As a result, you may well choose to read only part of it. The opening few paragraphs speak of my experience in the planning and presentation of a talk on astrophotography to a non-expert audience. After a couple of tiny footnotes you'll get to two appendices. The first of these was written in response to requests to provide a synopsis of the above talk; it includes a lot of links to various packages etc. So far, so good. The second appendix was added as a note of my parallel struggles trying to get a replacement laptop to run all my astrophotography needs in the way my rapidly-fading older one did; it's distinctly nerdy and is also replete with links.]
