Meh. The sky background is too bright. I fumbled with the setup and the first good frame was at 5:15, while the last "not complete garbage due to sunrise" frame was at 5:40. Should have woken up even earlier and ready to shoot by 4:00!
I bet you have never seen a sunrise from this perspective. Argh.
Oh there you are, I can see you, there is no reason to hide. Single 15s exposure, full processing would hopefully reveal a faint tail:
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.
In Sydney, there is a chance while it is still dark. Note that final trajectory corrections did not happen as of writing capturing this snapshot, so be sure to look around.
If you are near or about Australia, you will get some luck. For us Northeners the last chance to image was yesterday. Anyway, you would see the azimuth and elevation in degrees. Note the time in UTC. Negative elevation means below horizon.
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".
...Gotcha! These are not from Artemis II flyby, these are from the fairly large, but still amateur telescope standing on the Earth ground near this guy, who was freezing his bottoms off. They compete in resolution, but certainly not in composition!
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.
Nah, kidding. I have dedicated astrophotography cameras with clear windows that transmit IR pretty well. That is why we have UV/IR filters to cut the IR *out*. Imaging with consumer cameras is possible, but it is a significant step back ergonomically. (Puts it in "to sell" pile).
Now, the only missing thing to go for NIR astrophotography is finding the ASCOM driver for Sony A6000 :) I would have been catatonic if the sensor turned out to be monochrome version, but you cannot be *that* lucky, I guess.
People pay people to do these IR mods for (astro)photography reasons. Yanking IR filter requires reassembling camera, hopefully in clean room. The guy did not realize what he actually had on his hands, oh-ho. Putting IR filter also fixes white balance calculations, apparently.
I put it away as a curiosity. Fast forward a few years, and now I have UV/IR cut filters from my astrophotography rigs, so I can definitely confirm this is an IR-modded camera. Look at very bright IR led in my monitor presence detector with and without filter :P
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.
Realtek RTL9210B bridge in this UGreen enclosure is really nice, getting full-on 550 MB/sec read/write over the entire disk here. SMART is supported. Trim is supported. Kewl, should have upgraded earlier.
"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.
You know what can be even funnier? There is no data that has stars not drowned in noise, alas. But we can take a star catalog and generate the starfield right at coordinates we want. This finally promotes the image to "AI generated" category.
Proper HDR combination shot: combining 15ms and 60ms exposures. Certainly better result than trying to stretch out the data from 15ms exposures. Fuller size: app.astrobin.com/i/f767fi
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)
