Astrophotography at it's most basic form is simply another genre of photography. We're using the same fundamentals as traditional fields of photography, and applying them to an astronomical setting. However, I think it would be very misleading to say that astrophotography is just another form of photography. The way you go about astrophotography is a bit different from daytime photography.
They key difference is in the availability of light. Traditional forms of photography usually take place with an abundance of light, but astrophotography deals in extremely low light scenarios (for the most part). So astrophotography becomes a task of accumulating enough light to see the very subjects you're trying to capture. Usually, in traditional photography forms, the most effort goes into the composition of the image (i.e. framing the photo to catch a certain angle, manipulating lighting, color, depth of focus to impact out perspective, adjusting camera settings to achieve a well balanced exposure, and so on...), and the goal is to create an aesthetically pleasing photo, that looks very similar to how we would see it with our own eyes. Astrophotography is less intuitive, because most of what we are taking pictures of is not easily seen by our naked eyes. So composition may not be the most prominent part of astrophotography. Of course how much effort goes into your composition depends on the target (are you targeting a deep space object like a galaxy or nebula, or is it a astro/night landscape image?), but composing the photo is just one step in the Astrophotography process. To overcome the low light barrier, there's really only one solution- take really long exposures. Traditional photography usually only requires an exposure of just a fraction of a second. Astrophotography will require exposure times of many seconds- if not minutes (Unless your capturing the Sun, Moon, or planets). But a single exposure for astrophotography is usually not ideal because our targets are usually obscured by noise and graininess generated by heat and even the camera itself. Luckily we can get around that by taking a bunch of the same images and averaging the noise out, but this now requires us to take a ton of extra photos. So already, there's a bunch of extra work just to capture the initial photo. Processing and "Editing" a photo can be a touchy subject in traditional photography because you tend to want to make subtle and minimal adjustments keeping the photo close to how our eyes see the world (unless you're trying to generate an abstract image). But using photo adjustments is almost a necessity for astrophotography. We have to make more strategic adjustments to get the image to look how we think our eyes would see it, and most of the finer astronomical details would otherwise be hidden by noise and excess image data. Image processing is arguably the most intensive part of astrophotography. In essence (the TL;DR of what I just wrote): the basic steps to astrophotography are 1) setting your self up to get a desirable image, 2) taking a bunch of the same photos to later turn into a much better and usable single image, and then 3) adjust and process your image to remove any unwanted noise/data to bring out the good astronomical details we all love. Of course, astrophotography will get much more complicated, and all depends on the targets your imaging and your level of quality expectation... But no one wants to hear that if they're new to this hobby. So my advice is take a camera, point it at the sky, and start experimenting! It's the only way to truly learn, and you'll have a blast doing it!
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