Aleksey Shipilëv

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

Calibrate your instruments *before* going into the field, Aleksey. Calibrate your instruments *before* going into the field, Aleksey. Calibrate your instruments *before* going into the field, Aleksey. Calibrate your instruments *before* going into the field, Aleksey. Calibrate your instruments *befo

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.

Seriously, though: if you have mobile/backup SSDs, make sure you read from them at least once every 6 months to let controllers figure out if storage needs to be rebalanced / error-corrected a bit. Helps if you can just plug the drive in and `zfs scrub` it.

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.)

I suggest you pick up a 45-day trial version of PixInsight and see if it resonates with you. People say it overly complicated and hard to understand, so allocate decent time to learn it. OTOH, I suspect most software engineers just intuitively click into how it works after a brief tutorial.

And yes, with PixInsight I'm able pull out a lot of stuff out of fairly subpar subs. It would require a lot of work (scratch that) fun learning how to process data without messing it up really badly, just badly, subtly badly, etc. It is quite expensive, especially with usual plugins, but worth it.

AstroBin helpfully says the exposures: 20x60s shots, so 20 min total integration. AM5N with OAG guiding allows to stay on target for hours, but that is excessive for broadband targets. I'm mostly limited by "I already spent half a day building dark library, let's not push it over 300s subs".

Experienced folks scare novices away with their double-digit hours total integration times. If I ever start a YouTube channel about any of this, it would be something along the lines of "1-Hour Astrophotography Speedrun, Any%".

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

Now, there is a non-zero probability some frost -- now water -- is inside the laptop as well. So now at home it gets its own overnight desiccant pouch treatment. This refurbished ThinkPad might have thought it retired into a loving home for chill office tasks, but no such luck.

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.

Too bad, EAF is a major quality of life improvement!

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.

Alternative way to carry this bundle is:

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

You know what, I might actually enjoy this deep-sky rig quite a bit. This thing is seriously fast, so that it gives me something like *this* with only 1.5 hrs total integration time and absolutely rushed post-processing with the simplest workflow I could imagine.

Look, in the field where "metal" is everything beyond hydrogen and helium, Moon astrophotography ("astro", he-he) is planetary work :P

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

Both are on AstroBin now: app.astrobin.com/i/o6ojbu, app.astrobin.com/i/v5uivn -- for future reference, as I should stop betting that BlueSky image processors do the right thing :)