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.

Remastered the recent full Moon shots from the best data I had that night: app.astrobin.com/i/xp3dn4

Got my new imaging rig through its first 2 hours of deep-sky work: app.astrobin.com/i/vvcd9r

Full Moon (November 2025) -- first data processed from the stripped down FRA500 setup, which I nominally assembled for deep-sky. But it can be adjusted for non-demanding planetary work too: app.astrobin.com/i/zfk64u

Yay, new imaging rig assembled and tested on terrestrial. Not visible here: f/3.9 reducer which, combined with 90mm aperture, is going to make this uberfast, cutting exposures (smashes calculator) 4x compared to old one. Useful when I have only a few hours a week shooting things.

How dry do you want your astro-camera to be done? -- Yes.

RepairCafe: Saturday, Oct 25, 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.

Processed C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) comet result is now here: app.astrobin.com/i/le4ios. Bonus: tail video to show how the tail develops over time: app.astrobin.com/i/34bmp1

High integration time and low light pollution are good, for sure. But you can and should just get out and shoot stuff, because "any data >> perfect data" in this game. These two are 10x60s stacks, with a "slow" f/7 scope + dual narrowband filter, from a very bright city center.

I loved you, Coronado PST. I hated you, Coronado PST. You gave me the best Sun Hα images. You gave me the worst Sun Hα images. Now it is time to fulfill your destiny and become the integral part of much larger imaging train. (Shout out to AOK Swiss for consulting and adapters!)

High-maintenance hobby is: you do not really want to go outside Sunday night and freeze your bottom off, but if you don't, the next chance you will be able to do so is in 1350+ years. (Imaging C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) comet)

(looks at another hair-raising concurrency bug and taps the sign again)

Finally moved my most promising astrophotography results from the last months to AstroBin, enjoy: app.astrobin.com/u/shade

A periodic reminder that you can re-process iconic Hubble images from the publicly available Hubble raw captures using the pretty standard astrophotography tooling. Since all of this is synthetic color, you can choose your own for extra trippy results.

Ever seen a verbose render how a very small GC operation looks like in the context of larger safepoint? Here it is: (I need to blog about things you can see there)

Argh, this hobby is half frustration. The mosaics was miscaptured with clipped edge. Why could not it clip on the DARK edge? Argh. So close to 200 megapixels. Argh.

3x Barlow pushes 80/560 refractor and 2.0μm pixel camera way below the diffraction limit for pixel-perfect resolution. You can still recover some by post-processing tricks. This photo is 9Kx9K, likely very printable! Downsampled 4x here for preview:

If you ever find yourself unsure where you are in relation to the Universe, look up, find Saturn, and check it looks perfectly straight. ᵗʰᵉ ᵒᶠᶠᵉʳ ᶦˢ ᵗᶦᵐᵉ⁻ˡᶦᵐᶦᵗᵉᵈ ⁻⁻ ᶠᵒʳ ᵇᵉˢᵗ ʳᵉˢᵘˡᵗˢ ᵖᵉʳᶠᵒʳᵐ ᵗʰᵉ ᵖᵒˡᵃʳ ᵃˡᶦᵍⁿᵐᵉⁿᵗ ᵒᶠ ʸᵒᵘʳ ʰᵉᵃᵈ

Using narrowband filters (Baader Solar Continuum 7.5nm in this case) does improve Moon contrast quite a bit, even though it pushes the exposure times way up. A doublet with heavy chromatic aberration gets fairly monochromatic light :P [Downsampled 4x here for preview:]

Trials for high resolution full Moon mosaics are in progress. You don't need a cooled camera when it is already cold outside 🥶.

Trying out Baader Solar Continuum 7.5nm filter. Pros: contrast improves quite a bit. Cons: narrowband means longer exposures, with 3x Barlow it goes into 50ms, which turns lucky imaging into REALLY LUCKY imaging. Left: what SDO sees. Right: what my scope sees.

This is happening. I have been using PixInsight for deep-sky and most of the solar/lunar work during the 45-day trial period, and it did not disappoint. Best €350 I spent on astrophotography stuff so far.

Astrophotography things I believed in half a year ago: expensive acquisition hardware. Things I believe in now: expensive post-processing software, plus post-processing skills. Same raw data, drastically different outcomes.

30 minute total exposure of M31 (Andromeda Galaxy) + M110 companion from the bright Potsdam city center.

Me: "Astrophotography in the city sky is so frustrating, so much light pollution". Also me: <deploying the photo rig literally between two streetlights>

I find it amazing that amateur gear can track so well. Doing a single shot with 15 min exposure, through the open window, with 10 °C gradient between room and outside, in strong wind, gives you this! ~1° FOV means the sky moved ~3x the frame width during this exposure. What.

RepairCafe: Saturday, Sep 27, 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.

New toy, "residence graphs": tracking the compilation level for top method in the stack. On the left, normal JIT mode: compilers are busy, intp -> T2 -> T3 code is hot; T4 code slowly takes over. On the right, normal AOT+JIT (Leyden) mode: AOT code carries most of it, JIT happens to plug the holes.