Aleksey Shipilëv

See, you just need to park HST in your backyard once it safely de-orbits some time in next decade! Invest in good mount in advance, something about 5 tonnes would do.

Pillars of Creation - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillars..., but yeah.

It takes a while to get the hang of, especially dealing with very low contrast 64-bit integer FITS, but oh my. Oh my...

This morning I suddenly realized the Hubble Space Telescope has the public data archive, where one can download, for example, the 18000x18000 perfectly aligned R/G/B FITS of M42 and practice astrophoto postprocessing workflows on it. What time to be alive!

Feels like I cheated the weather today, hard. I was prepared for that tiny clearing in the clouds. Take that, clouds, and thank you!

A bit of luck with two hour clearing in the clouds, stable equatorial mount, medium-sized refractor, monochrome camera, basic guiding software, 30 GB of raw data, a bit of post-processing, et voila: Sun surface granulation is clearly visible, along with some nice Sun spots.

Repair Cafe: Saturday, July 26, 11:00..15:00 at Potsdam SLB. (Surprise! No summer break for us!). Come bring your curiosity and your broken devices, we can tinker together. We speak German, English, Russian.

Me: Enjoys astrophotography, complains about the clouds.
Also me: Literally works for a cloud company.

German children books are teaching the way local economies work. Easter bunnies cry about skilled worker shortage, enlist some farm animals to "help" with their work. Hired animals proceed to do it... arguably poorly. But the Easter bunnies are happy and rest instead. 10/10.

Lukas! No! Put it down! Shoo!

Why? Because screw you, that's why. Enjoy your sunny work days.

On this picture: you are an amateur astrophotographer having a convenient weekend free time window, but you live in E̸u̸r̸o̸p̸e̸ G̸e̸r̸m̸a̸n̸y̸ B̸e̸r̸l̸i̸n̸ Potsdam.

The Turing test is woefully inadequate in the times when people are able to see Jesus face in a toast. There is a considerable overlap between sufficiently smart toasters and insufficiently smart toaster users. Especially when toaster is well trained, and users are not.

If this astrophotography thing does not work out, I can always switch to bird^W insect watching. This little bug is about 1 arcminute wide, roughly the angular size of International Space Station.

It had been half a day, and the laptop is *still* not ready, since every major step is slow. Man, people live like this? Jokes on you, Linux is still deeply involved in the process, as I grab full-disk snapshots after each major step. Ain't nobody got time to do installs again %)

The end result is I am having a German-language Windows laptop for my hobby. A situation that was unthinkable for me 10 years ago. Now back to my long-forgotten past time: waiting for Windows updates to install.

Plunging deeper into astrophotography, decided to get a refurbished laptop to drive the hardware and isolate personal data. Came with Windows preinstalled. Why not, if most astrosoftware is native. German seller, so it came with German language pack. Why not, if I understand it.

Not yet, but I am looking at some listings. People have... um... creative ideas on how to pitch their weird houses for sale.

I strongly recommend either DIY-ing the dual hose for this unit (relieves negative pressure that makes the _rest_ of the house hotter), or splurging for mobile split solutions, like Midea Portasplit. I did both, both work better than just a single-hose monoblock.

"The house sports a spacious under the roof sauna for your daily relaxation needs. Just bring some water and splash it all over the floors. Also try not to die while there, like the previous owner did. We have a special on haunted roof spaces!"

Who spent 3 hours in the sun yesterday, capturing 320+ GB of Sun footage in good seeing, but somewhat strong wind, only to discover at the end of the session that mount head was not properly screwed in and wobbling?

<--- This guy.

Начинаю подозревать у моего кольца проблемы с сахаром: когда я ем очень много сладкого, оно перестаёт легко слезать! Думаю сводить его к ювелиру-эндокринологу.

Extremely fun Sun today. First attempt at compositing disk/limb/proms shots, what a day to randomly try one!

PSA: If you are running your servers outside the plane of ecliptic (not advisable), expect some of the workloads to mysteriously fail.

Star test at random point in the sky. Enough to YOLO some things without extra guiding. Comparing with star atlas, apparent magnitude <13.5 is resolvable with 5 min total integration.

English is egregious at backward compatibility.

Repair Cafe: Saturday, June 28, 11:00..15:00 at Potsdam SLB. (The last one before summer break, I think.) Come bring your curiosity and your broken devices, we can tinker together. We speak German, English, Russian.

First light for second-hand ASI533MC camera. The sensor is huge, so it requires Barlow lenses to have any reasonable disk size, which unfortunately forces to bump the exposure, which fights the atmosphere. It does resolve things well, though!

Vacation: get up late, stretch, enjoy some coffee, feel relaxed, mark all atomic ops as std::memory_order_relaxed, have a nice breakfast, push to production, go for a walk, do not look at the phone and screaming alerts, read a book, visit a friend who isn't on call, watch sunset.

More Friday morning Sun. One of 10+ shoots in multiple modes, again feels pretty close to the limit what my current setup can do with full-disk shots. Next stop: 2x Barlow and mosaics.