Askar SQA55 is just really good; quite a bit better than FRA500. I can see how that is a gateway drug into the rest of SQA series. When >130mm SQAs become reasonably priced (a man can dream), it would be absolute fire. Here is Bode's Galaxy again: app.astrobin.com/i/vioe5g

Oh, how I love terrestrial shots through well-corrected telescopes. Seeing perfect water drops on the leaves 25 meters away, nice. (Snatched a second-hand SQA55 + a few accessories for nearly half the price of new.)

Oh, yes. Little Bode's Galaxy, we call him. app.astrobin.com?i=38wqki

Interesting, most of the higher-performing Lunts are sold out until September here. People must be preparing for total solar eclipse in August. Every other week, I pat myself on the back for getting Lunt 60, and wait for someone to finally get desperate and buy my old PST :P

"Living, Breathing, European Heatwave Searing Sun: 1 Hour Hα Timelapse". Higher resolution attempt, now that I have a larger 676MM sensor and better match to Lunt 60. Full size and specs: app.astrobin.com/i/f5to2n

YOU GUYS, I think I found what is responsible for this freaking heatwave! It was the Sun all along! There would have been no problems if Sun was not shining, at very least no one would ever complain again. The camera sensor is now at +55°C, I am sure it is fine.

It never ceases to amaze me how many stars are visible from a bright city center, with a very modest terrestrial equipment, and a very light post-processing. Single 300s shot, 45°x30° FOV, unguided tracking, background cancellation, auto-stretches.

Love it when long-exposure shots come with embedded visualization. Here, we can see 8 flashes for aircraft anti-collision lights. Almost 9, if they were sampled at the edges of the line. With 10s exposure, this computes to 54 per minute, within [40; 100] per minute mandated by EASA/FAA.

You know what, I would start calling this THE TRILLIONARE'S CURSE now. As far as I can see, the majority of 10s frames have multiple satellite streaks present. Normally those would be rejection-stacked out, but no chance for widefield timelapses. More at: app.astrobin.com/i/rpt8am

I kid you not, we are at the software quality point where you can go to Google front page with a simple query, expand the AI assistant dialog, and observe Firefox eating 3 CPUs doing nothing but repaints. (Does not reproduce on Chromium, AFAICS).

Practicing more ultra-widefield timelapses. The sky rotates at 360°/day = 15°/hour around the North Celestial Pole. Polaris sits visually near the NCP, but not quite there, so you can see it moving as well. The midnight sky is bright. Full size and specs: app.astrobin.com/i/x7xbgd

Cloudy days? No problem, cloudy videos. 2 hours timelapse in 2 minutes: app.astrobin.com/i/b9xc3m

I planned that it would work, and it worked! A square monochrome sensor, and just small enough Barlow to frame the disk. Having high hopes for the next Sun timelapse. Ye gods, I adore my second-hand Lunt 60, it gives me no trouble. app.astrobin.com/i/iupg0m

While my EdgeHD 8 waits for some light repairs, it would have been a crime to pass a night with excellent seeing. Good news, Moon shines in near IR, whether with heatwave or not: app.astrobin.com/i/7pnv6g

Hα Sun time-lapse, the first of hopefully many. 1 hour of data acquisition (modest 30K frames, 130 GB raw), 8+ hours of processing (includes a few false starts). Full-size video, workflow details, etc: app.astrobin.com/i/59uc7v

You need to avoid Twitter for a couple of days because of The Boys series finale spoilers, or else you would know that Homelander has also joined Anthropic.

Sundays are for new experiences. Today was the first time I replaced the mesh on my Aeron Remastered chair, which involved changing the whole seat assembly, which involved sawing off the old seat.

Have not completed or posted the SHO version of Heart Nebula, even though I have collected this data back in December. Reprocessed today: app.astrobin.com/i/steu8x

Ship it! (I have no words.)

When I'm tired at the end of the day and cannot see clearly, I ask an AI agent "Can you spot the bug in these lines here?" -- and it does. So I'm most productive when tired. I hope nobody catches on this tre PRETIRED ENGINEERS FOR OUR PRETRAINED MODELS FOR $9.99/HR CANCEL ANYTIME

Spent better part of my time last few months on this most satisfying piece of work. So many low-level things to obsess about. It was the first time in my life I looked at results, auditing why performance improved on 20+ benchmarks, but not on THIS ONE. github.com/openjdk/jdk/...

More adventures with lucky imaging and Lunt 60. This one is full-disk shot, 80% stacking of 1000 frames, pre-filtered at acquisition at ~15%. It looks very compelling, and would be even nicer in calmer air. Downsampled to 1K here, full size: app.astrobin.com/i/8djvmg

Playing with more lucky imaging techniques. Turns out, SharpCap can monitor the seeing and only save raw frames that pass the quality bar. This is shot in conditions that would never give me any good result before. Full: app.astrobin.com/i/gk3bqy

Galaxy season is officially on. app.astrobin.com/i/vtx7y2

It finally dawned on me why would anyone launch a datacenter in orbit. How would that make any commercial sense? It took this guy to spell out one of the uses: youtu.be/jbp3kdJZ1_A?... -- TL;DR: in-orbit compute to (pre-)process synthetic aperture radar data. Ugh.

The real reason you want 10G home network: you can plug your astro-laptop with a 2.5/5G USB adapter and upload 1 TB raw capture within an hour. The transfer speed is limited by laptop's USB 3 port.

Yay, second-hand Lunt LS60MT (420/60), B1200, R&P arrived, mounted and first-light tested. This is a significant upgrade from my old and trusty Coronado PST (400/40). It works just out of the box, oh how I missed a good focuser.

Only a few systems are designed to withstand a motivated adversarial insider. An efficient actor can ruin most businesses within a day. Now, what if we put an AI agent to roam free independent of human judgment... surely nothing bad is going to h aww wheres my backups you clanker

Just as I figured out a cute and tight setup to run my old Coronado PST with, this has coincided with it going onto "to sell" pile, as I await the delivery of my -- hopefully even better! -- Lunt 60. The struggle never ends! (/me clutches his pearls)

Who woke up at 4 AM today to have a chance at capturing C/2025 R3 (PANSTARRS) comet before dawn? <--- This guy

OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI: openjdk.org/legal/ai. This aligns with my experience using GenAI tools: they are good at grasping some dusty context corners, but for surgical OpenJDK work you need to absolutely own every single line you push into the project.

Artemis II is re-entering today. If you want to try your luck capturing it, JPL Horizons would tell you where to look. Go to: ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/app..., Target body: "Artemis II", Observer location: <yours>, Time specification: <set today>. Table settings: + "Apparent AZ & EL".

Oh, Artemis II lunar photos are *TIGHT*. Should print them in large format for extra bang.

Oh man, recording the most rare lunar photos on SD cards! In rad-hard environment! How does one do 3-2-1 backup in those conditions? Copy immediately to USB SSD, burn the backup right to M-Disc blanks... IN SPACE. (Imagine a NASA contract for SD card data recovery, ouch.)

Artemis II Earth shot is very promising, even in the *compressed* low-res image, it is closing up on infamous "Blue Marble" photo. Rotated to more familiar angle, did some light touchups. Cannot wait for NASA to publish uncompresed/high-resolution source for it.

Back in COVID days when I was shopping for better cameras, a guy at local eBay sold me this camera, claimed untested, for peanuts. The camera had a bad white-balance and other funkiness. When pressed about this, the guy said he salvaged it from some equipment garbage.

Pro-tip: Prefer self-documenting components.

The clouds are in, so solar work is delayed in favor of astro shitposting.

"I don't need another M.2->USB bridge", "There are no SATA M.2 drives these days", I said to myself when preparing for RepairCafe last week. Then 3 (!) different persons show up with SATA M.2 drives, which my NVMe->USB bridge refused. ... Now I own another (SATA) M.2->USB bridge.

Me, running heavyweight GC test suite with fastdebug JVM under QEMU x86_64 -> PPC64 binfmt wrapper.

(Resisting the urge to start astro YT channel) Basic dual-dual-narrowband OSC to SHO is pretty easy, you just H = process(stack(Ha_OIII)); S = process(stack(SII_OIII)); S_H_O = combine(R = S[R], G = H[R], B = S[G] + S[B] + H[G] + H[B]). Everything else is a question of taste.

Stretching out the earthshine from waxing Moon. These are usually done by HDR stacking of multiple-exposure images. This one is *just* stretching things out of the dark from the single-exposure stack. Full size: app.astrobin.com/i/6n7fwp

(reads the news, sighs, updates the motto)

We have to say goodbye to Horsie, as it leaves us with the rest of Orion to hang out below horizon for the summer. app.astrobin.com/i/ama005

Rosette Nebula last night, when I finally shot it from the actual outside. Gives much less noise, stronger on-band SII signal, tighter stars. There are more things to do in post-processing here. app.astrobin.com/i/v1uedi

It is honestly incredible that you can have a mount that can: a) be drift-aligned with software within 3 arc-min error; b) track at <1 arc-sec/min drift. Compared with sidereal rate of 900 arc-sec/min and "noise" RMS of 0.5 arc-sec, this guiding is basically atmosphere limited.

Realized people are still struggling to connect USB (non-C) from the first try. Here is a trick that becomes obvious after you read the USB specification (you did that before using USB, right? /s): the USB icon should be visible. Works about 95% of the time for me.

Upcoming SQL:2026 ISO/ANSI Standard would catch up with real-world use cases by introducing RADICAL LEFT JOIN and RADICAL RIGHT JOIN. The exact implementation details are deferred to actual vendors.

Astrophotography game is: a) match the hardware to target; b) deal with signal-to-noise by longer integration times; c) deal with SNR using filters matching the target; d) pull data out in post-processing. As evidenced by this progression:

Finally collected enough SII data yesterday to get the full SHO palette for Rosette Nebula. Mind you, this is still very lazy through-closed-window shot that I babysat in-between waiting for Hotspot builds. app.astrobin.com/i/zov46x