We think most people understand that astrophotos are time exposures and that it takes time to achieve the most resolution and color saturation. Obviously live online viewing allows for only real-time accumulation of photons, so there will be a limit to the quality of the image.

Above you see a demonstration of the resolution and signal-to-noise achieved with various exposure times. Such improvement of the images increases with the square root of the exposure duration. That is, it takes an exposure 4 times as long to double the signal-to-noise. It takes 9 times as long to triple the signal-to-noise, and so on. We feel that with the sensitivity and the aperture of the instrument available to us, many popular galaxies render in a meaningful way in 10 to 12 minutes. Not unlike a cooking show, images that are already prepared can be offered to show what the image would look like with increasing exposure times, but hopefully the live, “that’s really up there right now” sense of a live view helps the viewer to experience the universe in a more direct, visceral way.