That "sat there staring at it for a minute" part is real, I caught myself doing the same thing when my old mill hit a round number. I read somewhere that most of those counters just keep going till the battery dies or someone resets them, so yours might have rolled over before and you'd never know. We tend to treat machine hours and part counts like some kind of scoreboard, but the only number that ever mattered was whether the check cleared.

That line about duct taping a webcam to a 6 inch dob got me, that is exactly the kind of chaos that gets you hooked. I read somewhere that the cooling thing matters way more than people think because a warm mirror makes its own little air currents that smear everything, so your 30 minute wait probably did as much for that Cassini division as the fancy camera did. I still have my first shot of Jupiter from like 2012 and it looks like a orange smear with a bite taken out of it. Sometimes I pull it up next to my newer stuff just to remind myself the gear was never the whole story.