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

Still lazy going out at night, so more through-window tests, this time with proper scope, not just adapted telelens: app.astrobin.com/i/ud0fkr

Can we appreciate how magical modern CMOS sensors are? If you cool a 26MP sensor to -10C and do a single 30 minutes exposure, there are hardly any hot pixels visible. Only with very aggressive stretch you see some, and you can stretch out only *minor* amp glow? How crazy is that?

All right, it is all fun and games, but shooting narrow-band through the closed window looks actually viable. app.astrobin.com/i/eem1o1

This was the acquisition software exercise, but it is ridiculous what you can shoot through the closed window. app.astrobin.com/i/rh2fdw

Partial Moon mosaics with the largest scope I have and the smallest sensor I have. Imperfect mount alignment caused mosaic to run away half past Moon disk, so I have only partial disk coverage, argh. app.astrobin.com/i/gmex5d

This is finally something I can reasonably call successful, yay! Took me a while to get here. app.astrobin.com/i/eeimdi

Happy to report the widefield rig is performing nearly as expected, with only minor inconveniences. app.astrobin.com/i/ymu8i3

Aleksey – Orion, round 2, fight! Coming back with fixed widefield rig after a flop yesterday.

Several important things failed as I was doing this widefield project last night, but there is at least *some* recoverable results from it. app.astrobin.com/i/lrejtg

Jupiter shots from Saturday; with little animation included. app.astrobin.com/i/hl230w

Some processed Moon shots from Saturday. SCT held the collimation over the month of use pretty good, but not perfectly. Would be greater next time. app.astrobin.com/i/qidkmx

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.

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!