The future is basically choosing whether you pay a monthly subscription for a service which uses your data to build a model that runs the killbot that is about to kick your door down, or not. But I am sure it is here to deliver my sushi order.

Some of the early preprocessed Moon shots from tonight: a bigly scope (EHD 800) with a smol sensor (ASI715MC). One panel of 30-panel mosaic, to be slowly processed over the weekend, hopefully.

RepairCafe: Saturday, Feb 28, 11:00..15:00 at Potsdam SLB. Come bring your curiosity and your broken devices. We can tinker together, maybe successfully, maybe not, but it should be fun either way. We speak German, English, Russian.

Polished the second-hand Samyang 135 rig a bit more. It is so cute, I just can't. Widefield astrophotography is easy, by the way, you just need a good telephoto lens and a few... well, a few... like, just a bit more things attached to it.

Folks, "Feb 28 planetary parade" is full of AI slop. Half of the parade needs unobstructed 20° alt. Plus, it gets uncomfortably close to the sun; DO NOT EVEN TRY ANY OPTICS UNTIL SUN IS COMPLETELY GONE, I CANNOT EMPHASIZE THIS ENOUGH. And you need optics to resolve planets...

Ye gods, I love buying second-hand stuff from fellow amateur hobbyists. You can clearly see they (we) sell things that we have taken good care of. Holding up my end of the bargain by sending back the acceptance test results when closing the transaction.

More "No Effort Productions" from last night. This time leaning heavily onto post-processing. I hate that it is not *that much* worse in comparison to one I shot freezing by bottoms off. app.astrobin.com/i/c8n2uc

Continuing to sift through "no effort" shots through the window from yesterday. He-e-e-e-e-ere is Horsie! Whooping 1 minute total exposure time. Internal reflections in 2-pane glass window from Alnitak and σ Ori as a bonus.

Clear night tonight, but I am too lazy to go out. So instead I made "no effort" quick shots directly through the closed (!) window, with barely any polar alignment, without guiding, etc. 50x5s live SharpCap stack (left) is already quite good. ...and a few touchups later (right):

Tis' Orion season, which is a good starter target if you get into astrophotography. One thing you absolutely need to know: astrophoto is about total integration time, as you hunt for individual photons in darker areas. Don't be disappointed if your individual frames look dark...

More HST data re-processing, Horse Nebula this time: app.astrobin.com/i/o613bb. This is almost too easy with high quality data publicly available.

Gloomy cloudy days ahead with no clearing in sight, so I resort to processing Hubble Space Telescope, again. This one is (part of) Monkey Head Nebula. HST 2014 Anniversary picture was from the same data: app.astrobin.com/i/n910h0

We complain about light pollution for its impact on urban astronomy. But we almost never talk about the impact of public smoking compounded by cannabis legalization. The data does not lie: in Berlin, in the most depressing months of the year you get thick grey clouds for weeks!

REJOICE! It is January 2026, and I have finally managed to fix basic bleeding-edge builds for the b̸e̸s̸t̸ ̸ b̶e̶s̶t̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶f̶o̶r̶m̶i̶n̶g̶ m̴o̴s̴t̴ ̴s̴t̴a̴b̴l̴e̴ most popular JDK ever: JDK 8. Grab it while it is hot! builds.shipilev.net/openjdk-jdk8/ builds.shipilev.net/openjdk-jdk8...

"Dostoevsky's Demons and the Coming AGI Catastrophe": possessedmachines.com Need to learn some Russian to read Dostoevsky's "Бесы" in original. Also learn some XIX century Russian history to contextualize it. Anything to avoid thinking about this essay. Oh wait, crap...

Recovered 12 (!) 5s exposures for C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) from 5 years ago: app.astrobin.com/i/n8f57k -- I wish I could have stacked more...

Combining my largest aperture scope (EdgeHD 8") with my smallest pixel size sensor (ASI715MC) in preparation for high-res Jupiter and Moon shots. Shot in relative dark through a dirty window. Formally results in 0.15"/px, which is way below Dawes limit, but still usable.

IT industry: "Look, LOC added is the abhorrent measure of developer productivity; if anything we celebrate taking the code *out*". Also IT industry, somehow: "Look, our AI tool allows our developers to add 10 KLOC change within an hour, we have never been more productive!"

Happy to report I have found the silliest off-the-shelf way to power my astrophoto laptop in the field with a stack of my usual LiFePo4 batteries. Cigarette lighter socket USB-PD adapter be like: relax bro, we are rated for high current, don't look at everything else in series.

Updated JOL and heapdump-estimates in it specifically to better support JDK 25. We use this tool to quickly glance where are the opportunities in our real services. Streaming heap dump analysis allows doing this on multi-hundred GB heap dumps. Builds: builds.shipilev.net/jol/

Finally collimated my second-hand EdgeHD 800 -- Tri-Bakhtinov masks are awesome, BTW -- and this unlocks high-resolution planetary work. First test shot after first collimation: app.astrobin.com/i/i28l14

M45 (Pleiades) from last night; I think this scratches against the 1 hour practical limit for total integration time spent outside in urban skies. app.astrobin.com/i/a6el2y

Jupiter, Bayer matrix pixelated edition. Captured it opportunistically with an imaging setup that is not really great for planetary work. app.astrobin.com/i/k44h0h

Great Orion Nebula is such an easy target to image, highly recommended for the beginners. You start having good results after just 30s of exposure already. And it is very forgiving in processing. app.astrobin.com/i/2gzqwy

Casual Friday night office. 640 W*h ought to be enough for anybody.

New arrival for updated conference calls background. (app.astrobin.com/i/152ckf, a bit remastered for printing)

It was cold yesterday, so instead of going out, played with remote imaging. It was not very cheap and especially not as satisfying as going out and acquiring your own data, but it gets the itch scratched, and you can splurge on larger apertures. app.astrobin.com/i/n0tl3q

100 Megapixel Moon (Trial Run): Verified that my new (second-hand) EdgeHD 8 can be mosaic-ed without much hassle. Once seeing improves, and collimation tools arrive, this would be extra awesome. app.astrobin.com/u/shade?i=l6...

How can you make sure that your USB SSD backup is intact after messing with hardware settings? Well, if you do ZFS backups, then you just plug the drive into the fastest port and scrub all that 4 TB of data in 1.5 hours.

USB bridges continue to be a funky mess. Salvaged my 2TB Samsung T7 Shield write performance by enabling TRIM via SCSI provisioning_mode=unmap, as described on Arch Linux wiki: wiki.archlinux.org/title/Solid_.... Used to write at 2 MB/sec, now writes at full speed.

Today and only today there is a prediction of not one, but *two* half-Moons during the day! Do not miss out on this! Also, grab a cup to condense all that 100% humidity while you are outside.

Also, my new desktop background, courtesy of Hubble Space Telescope Heritage data archives. app.astrobin.com/i/x3a2tt

Andromeda Galaxy last night. Going outside in -7°C for a few hours to acquire data really tests how much do you like a hobby. app.astrobin.com/i/152ckf

Of course you can take out all C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Python lines of code out of the codebase in 5...10 years. It is even easier than it looks. You just need to shut down every service that is related to business in any way. Done! Time to collect that breakthrough bonus.

Periodic reminder that archive.org is awesome and deserves our donations. It also routinely hosts BitTorrent files for their data, which is useful if you want to donate some bandwidth as well. Take this link as the example: archive.org/details/insi...

That feeling when you had the regular update script running at one of your public facing servers, but you also forgot to reboot it for 3.5 years. I am sure nothing bad is going to happen if I do it now, 2 days before NY break starts.

The moment our hero realizes that "artificial stars" used for collimating telescopes in amateur astronomy are just 50μm fiber fed by a light source, and that he has a lot of fiber cables like that just waiting to be used.

A new large-ish aperture light bucket has arrived. A second-hand OTA, and I love astrophotographer community for this: they keep their gear in usable/resellable quality for years. Of course, I had some of my own additions right away.

Hubble data archive is the good source for excellent data to work out astrophotography post-processing workflows. Wanted to try HaRGB combination ahead of going out and acquiring your own data? You can!

Finally the new optical train has no visible issues. No OAG prism shadowing, no vignetting, no guiding problems. Put the OTA on the mount and start shooting. Yay! Now to wait for clear moonless nights to gather hours of clean data. app.astrobin.com/i/e5eily

A lot of times when I fix a small corner-case bug somewhere in OpenJDK, there are people coming in and saying "Some our prod hosts went down with exactly these symptoms, we need this fix now". Happens way too often for a platform that allegedly no one uses anymore. /s

Breaking news, nobody have seen it yet: recent X-class solar flare and 3I/ATLAS comet are interacting heavily, making the OAG prism in my imaging train slipping into larger APS-C sensor field of view. <goddammit.jpg>

RepairCafe: Saturday, Nov 29, 11:00..15:00 at Potsdam SLB. Come bring your curiosity and your broken devices. We can tinker together, maybe successfully, maybe not, but it should be fun either way. We speak German, English, Russian.

Finally a government project to unite the humanity. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

Make sure your SSD drives are fully charged! (Not a technical advice. Consult with a specialist before plugging your devices to random USB ports.)

The "in and out, 20 minute adventure" test shots from allegedly Bortle 5 place already look promising, without even trying with doing everything accurately. Andromeda: app.astrobin.com/i/4gkx7r, Triangulum: app.astrobin.com/i/n9k63f, Pleiades: app.astrobin.com/i/pok45a

Went for astrophoto night in -3°C. Put multiple dew heaters on the scope, carried air-tight bags with desiccant pouches, etc. Thought it through, right? Ha, no, kept scraping off frost from my dedicated laptop screen, literal layers of it. Never a dull moment in this hobby.

Junior developers argue how language design impacts business. Senior developers argue how platform experience impacts business. Principal developers know their systems are about three system bugs away from massive failure, and the one they look at right now is one of those three.

Reminder: The bleeding edge JDK builds that are available at builds.shipilev.net, are also available as Docker images: hub.docker.com/r/shipilev/o... -- useful to track down JDK bugs. There are fastdebug builds too.

Some day most telescope manufacturers would realize that the majority of customers use their expensive astrographs with EAF permanently attached, and do the foam cuts in their boxes to accommodate that. That day is unfortunately not today. One can flip and do the ugly cut, though.