Do you also do astrophotography, or image capture into a computer? 50,000 images captured over 26 years, and stitched together with Photoshop?
I'm really impressed by armature astronomers that do that...! Awesome dedication...!
Oh, goodness no! Astrophotography is worse than golf as a hobby. I know very few astrophotographers who spend their time photographing. Most of them are cursing their hardware for not working properly, or not talking to their other hardware. Or cursing their software for updating in the middle of a capture. Or cursing... Well, you get the idea.
I'm pretty computer illiterate, and modern astrophotography is computer intensive. I don't think I'd EVER get all the bits (main camera, mount, guide camera, guide software, capture software, etc.) all talking together correctly. If, by some miracle, I did manage to get all that working, I'd still have hours of screen time processing the data with even more software. No thanks. Dedication for sure. However, I'll stand back and appreciate their results.
I have an old mount, with a fairly old purpose-built go-to computer and hand controller. I use a printed book I "made" from a planetarium program to figure out what I'll observe on any given night. I used the planetarium program to sort through the various stellar/ object catalogs for objects at latitude above -40 degrees and bright enough for me to see in my scope, at my location, with my decrepit eyes. Then I use my go-to system to point my scope and what I want to look at. I sometimes sketch objects, though. I need to get more dedicated with that. I'd like to develop that skill. Many sketchers use software for that, too. They'll scan their sketches and then process the images: inverting them so their pencil-on-paper sketches are now white-on-black instead of black-on-white, cleaning up stray marks, etc.