What hobby seems fascinating to most people but is actually boring if you dive into it?

Yep, I was into regular photography, well the boring and hard branch of photography called bird photography and even I struggled with astrophotography.

It really feels like you can either not buy much equipment and struggle with moving the camera a tenth of a millimeter every 3 minutes or you buy an eq mount and hook up your camera to your laptop and come back after a 7 hours nap to a neat pile of pictures that don't really show anything but after 4 hours of automated processing and some manual retouching show something about 80% good as Hubble. Which is nice, but it's not exactly something unique. And the extra annoying thing is the only way you get better is by investing more money.

At least in bird photography once you've got the 600mm f/4 for 10k you're set for life.

It depends on what you like, and how you do it.

Once you start to get serious, a lot of it is almost automated. You connect a video camera to your telescope, set the telescope to track whatever you're trying to image, and batch process the frames into a final image. There's still lots to do, but the boring parts are not too bad.

I find the setting up and tweaking interesting too though, so I might be biased :D

The process may be boring, but I assume the end result or discovering anything interesting would be exciting.

Thanks! Somehow despite lemming 10 hours a day, I missed that.

that link was boring until i dived into it.