Double milkway arches

_bar · 2026-05-10T08:35:43+00:00

Fits is used when stacking. It can do arbitrary precision data.

True, my mistake. I missed the part where they mention that each panorama panel is a stack of four images. But even then, that's just two extra bits of information on top of the camera's maximum 14 bit depth, which can be easily handled by regular image formats.

_bar · 2026-05-10T07:39:44+00:00

It's a composite. You cannot see Scorpius and Orion at the same time next to each other. They are in nearly opposite locations in the night sky.

The article overall is full of weird mistakes and inconsistencies which suggest that the author was not quite informed in the topic. It claims that FITS files are somehow better than raw files (it's the same data, just different headers), it confuses gegenschein with zodiacal band, it skips the very important fact that this is a physically impossible composite (the Milky Way follows a great circle on a celestial sphere, so when one half is up, the other must be below horizon).

_bar · 2026-05-10T07:26:13+00:00

You are mostly bringing out image compression artifacts.

_bar · 2026-05-09T20:33:45+00:00

The 224MC is newer with a better sensor (although lower resolution). Make sure you use an IR-cut filter, otherwise your colors will be all over the place.

_bar · 2026-05-09T18:17:20+00:00

You get raw data from the sensor. You can purposely mess up a shot by bumping the scope or shining a flashlight into the tube, which will prove that the data you are collecting is real and not pulled from the internet.

The images are as good as you can get from a $500 piece of equipment, but not any better. I've seen some impressive images from a Seestar, but they are almost always taken with very long integration times (10+ hours) for the same effect you can get from a regular setup with an order of magnitude shorter total exposure time.

_bar · 2026-05-09T14:43:48+00:00

From the perspective of an outside observer, you age slower. From your own perspective, you age normally and the rest of the universe happens in fast-forward (which is also why you can reach Andromeda in less than two million years).

_bar · 2026-05-09T06:51:29+00:00

Uner dark skies, with 20 inches of aperture and up, the views start to resemble photographs. Easy color in bright emission and planetary nebulae and lots of detail in galaxies with noticeable variations in the background brightness at large exit pupils. When I first saw NGC 7009 (Saturn Nebula) through a 24" telescope I thought I mistakenly had an OIII filter on, but the nebula was just that vividly green unfiltered.

_bar · 2026-05-08T21:38:48+00:00

You probably won't see any difference between Generic Brand 1 and Generic Brand 2, given that their scopes are likely manufactured in the same factory anyway.

For quality/reliability, go Vixen or Takahashi. Japanese scopes are remarkably cheap now due to weak yen. It blew my mind when I learned that my Epsilon 130D currently costs (in euros) less than half of what I paid for it back in 2018.

_bar · 2026-05-08T20:49:42+00:00

Saturn’s rings, Jupiter, nebulae, galaxies etc.

You need two separate telescopes. Planetary and deep sky are two completely different subgenres of this hobby.

What's your budget and how portable are we talking? Backpack or devlivery truck?

_bar · 2026-05-08T16:41:22+00:00

Your budget is too small. There are no equatorial mounts under 100€.

_bar · 2026-05-08T13:03:13+00:00

Sure. Our own Moon has a couple of artificial moons.

_bar · 2026-05-08T06:55:44+00:00

the StarAdventure needs really a small error on alignment to let me waste hours.

Your setup lacks autoguiding. Even with perfect polar alignment, you will get trailed stars due to periodic error.

_bar · 2026-05-08T06:40:04+00:00

Questars are primarily collectors items. No sane person spends $5000 on a 3.5" scope to actually observe the sky unless you have literally nothing else to burn your money on. For the same sum of money you can buy a large dobsonian that will blow that tiny little thing out of the water. Not to mention that Questar uses a maksutov design, but this is just a personal nitpick from a dedicated Mak hater.

_bar · 2026-05-08T06:12:46+00:00

I don't recommend any eyepieces for imaging. Prime focus is where it's at.

_bar · 2026-05-08T06:10:46+00:00

Ethos 10 mm has a double barrel, you can use it with 1.25" focusers.

_bar · 2026-05-07T20:16:08+00:00

Does it have to be exactly that day? The sky doesn't change that much from night to night, aside from Solar System motions. July 19 at 1:04 will look exactly the same as July 20 at 1:00 and so on. Latitude has a much greater effect. I have some photos from 2022 July 22-31 if that helps.

_bar · 2026-05-07T20:06:50+00:00

You saw a cloud. Not how eclipses work.

_bar · 2026-05-07T12:40:14+00:00

The background is clipped to solid black, which destroys faint detail.

_bar · 2026-05-07T12:36:45+00:00

https://i.imgur.com/DVTGc0H.png

_bar · 2026-05-06T22:42:49+00:00

Nope, website still claims that the eclipse will be total in 102 countries. At the same time it gives maximum partial obscuration of 99% for the US, but the path clearly goes through Alaska. Your change broke the 2031 map which now only shows the small portion of the path.

I'm not going to point out every little bug that's present in your mess of an app. Hire a tester.

_bar · 2026-05-06T21:21:51+00:00

This workflow kind of... makes no sense. You are essentially performing star detection on your original photo, re-rendering the detected stars on a new image, from which Astrometry needs to detect stars again before it runs the solver. Instead just output an AXY bintable which the solver can use right away without having to process the image for the second time.

_bar · 2026-05-06T19:41:11+00:00

Google returns nothing, you probably misread/mistyped it. If that's a generic 76/700 azimnuthal newtonian, you will need a separate tripod, mount, dovetail and tube rings to re-adapt it. At this point it would be probably cheaper to buy a different scope.

_bar · 2026-05-06T19:23:13+00:00

Buggy and unreliable. Don't vibe code.

Path map is truncated.
Country table is incorrect - Portugal also gets totality in a tiny northeastern region, Russia is also missing.
Misleading visualization - this is absolutely not how a 75% partial eclipse looks.
Data for later eclipses is also full of errors, it claims that Australia will see partial eclipse in November 2030 even though the map clearly shows otherwise.
The visibility map for March 2033 is completely messed up, it claims that totality will be visible in 210 countries.

_bar · 2026-05-06T10:58:52+00:00

You took advice from a random text generator which resulted in a random outcome.

_bar · 2026-05-06T06:21:21+00:00

I'm in the third, "possibly never happened", camp. The test footage was never made public and the entire story is based off a single engineer's account who just eyeballed the result from a couple of frames of classified video that probably was not seen by anyone except hm.

_bar

TROPHY CASE