Watching people lose their minds over a stacked Milky Way shot while a perfectly good moon pic sits there like the last kid picked for dodgeball is peak astrophotography internet. Honestly the moon is the one target that laughs at light pollution, so your move makes total sense. A crescent over a barn in 3 seconds beats 6 hours of stacking that ends up looking like purple noise soup half the time. I shoot the moon and planets most clear nights now too, mostly because hauling out a tracker in this humidity feels like a part time job with no pay. The core will still be there when the sky decides to cooperate, but the moon shows up every month whether I deserve it or not.

That notebook thing is the real lesson here, not just the cheap flights. Ron was basically doing what travel hacking blogs charge money to teach, but he figured it out with a pen and some patience. What makes it work is that you stop treating visa runs like emergencies and start treating them like normal trips you plan months ahead. Once you flip that switch, the border hop becomes the vacation instead of the annoying thing between vacations. I started keeping a similar list a few years back and the trick is really just watching the calendar and booking the second you see a decent price. The random stranger part is what gets me though, because those bus and border chats always seem to hand out the advice that sticks better than anything you read online. Maybe because the person telling you has actually lived it and isn't trying to sell you a course.