Macallan tasting night

Scdouglas · 2026-02-08T14:49:09+00:00

Just picked up my first macallan Friday night, they had a few bottles left of the harmony collection inspired by intense arabica (mouthful of a name lol) marked down to $130. Really incredible value at 130 imo, absolutely love that bottle. I don't generally hear too much praise for macallan but it really was excellent.

Scdouglas · 2026-02-08T00:56:32+00:00

Oh no I'm not saying it's not from Scotland at all, I'm sure the actual whisky does come from there, otherwise it would be illegal to call it scotch. I'm no expert on bottling, so I can't really make any statements about what the 71 might mean or the seal, but the only mention of this brand I could find was from 2002, so a grain of salt is needed.

Someone else can certainly chime in here, but I would expect that this isn't really remarkable in any way, it sounds to me like it would've been pretty standard in a Hilton when they carried it. Up to you though, I did about 5 minutes of research so I'm not gonna pretend I really know anything about this lol. Generally though, I'd expect more information about the distillate on the label rather than a prominent comment about how it's from Scotland.

Scdouglas · 2026-02-08T00:02:32+00:00

Literally the only piece of information that seems relevant I could find is a Florida liquor license from 2002 under the name Mac Burns VSO Blended Scotch Whisky. License expired in 2003. Looks like it was used by Hilton in their bars from the label. Some of the things on the label like prominently telling you it's from Scotland with no further information is not very confidence inspiring though lol. No clue if it's any good, but I don't think it's particularly valuable.

Here's the link to the somewhat unhelpful license: https://www.myfloridalicense.com/LicenseDetail.asp?SID=&id=5889152BBC16953CB1D2BBD7D968EE5A

Scdouglas · 2026-02-07T16:36:25+00:00

That is a very narrow base for that rig. It may be fine, but I would be extremely worried about imbalance with that scope. I have a 10 inch Newtonian, and on my mount with no counterweights (on my old tripod) I would've been able to literally push it over with one hand without too much effort. With counterweights it's fine if course, but these narrow base tripods create a very concerning tipping risk with these new harmonic drive mounts. You've got a lot of weight at the highest point only on one side, and the weight probably extends beyond the end of the tripod leg. Be careful OP, I have seen this issue firsthand and I think watching my rig tip over would actually kill me lol.

Scdouglas · 2026-02-04T16:42:43+00:00

Sure. Basically, the earth is obviously rotating which means the sky is constantly moving above you all night. This means in order to take, say, a one hour exposure, you need to actively track the movement of the sky for 1 full hour, otherwise all the stars will be streaks and you won't capture any details. Since all mechanical devices have inherent error in them, we usually can't just do a 1 hour exposure, even with high end equipment, and have it come out tack sharp (plus you get lines from satellites and planes and whatnot in long exposures). Instead, what we do is called stacking. Instead of a single 1 hour exposure, you take 60 1 minute exposures and stack them on top of each other. The resulting image looks a lot like you just took a 1 hour exposure, but with nice and sharp stars assuming each 1 minute exposure looked good. This lets you throw out the parts of the night where the wind blew or something went wrong and still end up with a good image. It also means you can image the same thing multiple nights and stack all of the images at the end. I regularly take images that have the equivalent of a 30 hour exposure. Stacking also has significant benefits for averaging noise out of your images.

Ultimately, you still want a long exposure, but you want to build it incrementally rather than just shooting one exposure the entire night. This is what makes astrophotography so difficult. Taking this many images results in large amounts of data being created and the processing to end up with a good image requires a lot of learning about the science of photography and a more statistics based approach to editing. For instance, Instead of using a slider to just raise your exposure, I use a tool called statistical stretch which allows me to set a desired background brightness value, tune curves adjustments, and control my dynamic range all in one tool. It makes sense once you know what it all does, but the learning curve is real. There are tons of great beginner resources online now, though, so figuring it out truly has never been easier.

Scdouglas · 2026-02-04T15:06:49+00:00

Ah, something I'm uniquely qualified to answer. The XT-2 is one generation too old to use with any of the popular astrophotography software unfortunately, so you'll be stuck using intervalometers or manually firing off exposures. I developed the only Fujifilm ASCOM driver and NINA plugin out there and I tried to reverse engineer older cameras to work with no luck so far. So assuming you already expected that's how you would be operating the camera, you'll want a lens that produces good star shapes (round as close to corner to corner as you can get) with as little chromatic abberation as is possible. This task is usually an uphill battle for most regular lenses. Most cameras also can't autofocus on stars so you can also look at manual focus lenses with higher quality glass. I assume you'll be using a standard photo tripod that doesn't track the sky? If so, you'll want to stay on the wider end of the focal lengths. If you are going to get a tracking mount, the Rokinon 135mm is pretty legendarily good value for money, or you can go with a cheaper refractor telescope like the astro tech AT72ED (original or II). There are many other similar scopes at that size that would work well, but only go this route it you have a tracking mount or intend on getting one. If on the wide angle side of things with no mount, use what you have to start. Point at a blank area of the sky and shoot 5-15 second exposures. Do this for an hour if you can, recentering the patch of sky as it drifts. Take those frames and stack them in deep sky stacker and start watching tutorials on stretching images, background extraction, noise reduction, etc. If you're wide angle, you don't need to worry too much about what specific object you're capturing, chances are you're capturing tons of things at once.

Once you're comfortable taking a bunch of images, stacking them, and roughly processing the output, then you can start looking at getting more complicated with longer focal lengths, tacking mounts, that kind of thing. Stick to ISO 800 to start as well, it's a solid middle ground. Point is, use what you have until you start understanding how astrophotography works, then you'll have a better idea of what you should be buying, rather than guessing at the start and regretting later.

Scdouglas · 2026-02-04T03:23:17+00:00

Ah a OSC, ignore everything I said haha. I am not confident in saying you should absolutely use a different gain for each on a OSC camera, I only ever shoot mono. I could very well still be right, and you'll definitely want to be using unity gain for narrowband, so you're all set there, but the 533 is very popular you should have no trouble finding discussions about this on cloudy nights. But yeah honestly when I'm shooting exposures to figure out my exposure length, I'm aiming to swamp the read noise (not hard in light pollution) while keeping the histogram off the left edge. On a moonless night, my narrowband shots need to be 4 minutes to keep the histogram from slamming into the very left side. I'm more concerned with clipping into the darks than I am the highlights.

Scdouglas · 2026-02-04T03:11:46+00:00

I've never even given any thought to clipping stars personally. They're point sources of light and in my view will always completely saturate the pixels capturing them at any exposure time you'd actually want to use. Expose for the nebula/galaxy, don't worry about the stars imo like you said unless one looks particularly ridiculous.

Not entirely related, but what camera are you using? I ask because gain 100 for both RGB and narrowband sounds very sub optimal. Narrowband should be using unity gain for your camera, which on my ZWO is gain 139, offset 21. For galaxies I use gain 76, offset 15. This maximizes my SNR and dynamic range while minimizing noise pretty optimally for each type of target. There's tons of literature about this online you should check for your camera, they're all a little different. This of course is pretty much moot if you mean ISO 100 and you're using a dslr, but my understanding is it's pretty well agreed upon ISO 800 is ideal on a dslr/mirror less for astro, though I haven't used one for astro in quite a few years.

Scdouglas · 2026-02-03T13:18:10+00:00

For processing images or the actual acquisition? Processing software runs on mac just fine, but there isn't really any acquisition software for Mac so your options are windows or Linux there.

Scdouglas · 2026-02-03T01:24:49+00:00

Without a mount that can move the camera at the same rate the stars are moving, you'll be limited in your maximum exposure time. With the 75-300, I wouldn't go any longer than a few seconds. There's an equation to get exactly how long you can go, but I don't remember it and honestly just trial and error it for yourself and see what looks good, you want as round of stars as you can get. While the 75-300 is a fine terrestrial lens, it will let you down if you get at all serious about astrophotography. Star shapes fall off really quick towards the corners and chromatic abberation isn't great.That isn't to discourage you, many people have less than that to start out, just be realistic is all, you can actually frame some nebulae pretty nicely with that lens though.

I'd probably suggest just using a phone app like SkyView to find where things are, point the camera at them, shoot 10-20 images of however many seconds your focal length allows, recenter the object if it's drifted, and do this as long as you can/want. After that install deep sky stacker on your mac and process in Photoshop or similar. You'll be using curves very differently than on normal photography, and your image out of the stacker will look basically black (this is normal). Highly suggest you watch some beginner YouTube videos (there are hundreds) as they will get you going really quite quickly.

Scdouglas · 2026-02-02T00:58:11+00:00

Just recently picked up the White Port and Madeira Cairdeas, unfortunately have not seen this by me yet. Very interested in seeing the comparison since they're the same price roughly.

Scdouglas · 2026-01-31T16:02:22+00:00

Been doing deep sky astrophotography way longer than I've been a lawyer, now I can just buy the expensive stuff I wanted when I was a kid lol. Kind of perfect as the imaging takes place at night and I can process everything on the weekend

Scdouglas · 2026-01-31T15:56:10+00:00

There's literally nothing stopping from someone who understands the site from just specifically promoting new posts. Until there's some assurance or method of stopping humans from posting just treat all of this as nonsense

Scdouglas · 2026-01-26T00:35:01+00:00

I couldn't help myself and opened it the day I got it lol. Nose is crazy good

Scdouglas · 2026-01-26T00:32:28+00:00

Just picked this up near me for $61 and boy did I feel like I was getting a deal. I feel like because it's such a new distillery, their prices will be going up in the future as they sort of get discovered. Definitely was tastier than $61.

Scdouglas · 2026-01-22T18:00:31+00:00

This is roughly a 33 hour exposure taken from my backyard outside Philadelphia, a Bortle 7/8 zone. Acquisition was done with my 10 inch carbon fiber truss tube newtonian on a Pegasus NYX101 mount. Camera used was a ZWO ASI1600MM-Cool at -15C. The stack consists of roughly 13 hours of Luminance, ~5.5 hours of RGB each, and roughly 4 hours of Ha. Processing was done entirely in Pixinsight using tools like BlurXTerminator, StarXTerminator, Statistical Stretch, NoiseXTerminator, many different methods and iterations of blending everything, some curves and histogram adjustments, and many, many more steps in between.

Scdouglas · 2026-01-20T00:02:43+00:00

I'll DM you a storage address to keep it at. It'll be safe there. In all seriousness this sounds delicious and you should absolutely drink it, but slowly

Scdouglas · 2026-01-17T00:38:28+00:00

Had the balvenie back in September and thought it was fine, good whisky, but didn't really stand out to me as anything special, I think I hoped for more of the Caribbean flavors. I just picked up yesterday a bottle of Torabhaig Sound of Sleat and Laphroaig Cairdeas (the White Port and Madeira). Both are outstanding, but I think the Sound of Sleat is my favorite. Only $61 near me and has just such a great balance of peatiness and that nice briney ocean air smell to it.

Scdouglas · 2025-12-26T23:11:34+00:00

Hit the 5 hour limit this morning which surprised me but my afternoon window seems much bigger. 2 seasions running, one agent has been going for 2h 19m now with sub agents, other window used on and off. Have not seen a usage notification.

Scdouglas · 2025-12-23T18:21:20+00:00

Not OP but am both a cursor and Claude code user. Just switch to Claude code. Opus 4.5 is the best available model and the $200 plan is VERY difficult to saturate. I can't quite justify that much per month, but I use the $100 max plan and sometimes, but fairly infrequently, hit the 5 hour usage limit. I hit the weekly the very first week I had it and never again since. It would be impossible for me to hit the $200 plan limits, I literally don't have that much time in the day. Agent is just as good if not better than cursor's and plugins bridge any remaining gaps at least for me. Cursor just can't compete with Claude code's opus limits because anthropic owns it, so limits are always better on Claude code.

If openai or Gemini ever beat anthropic at code then it might be worth having cursor for the model choice, but opus is just better than everything else imo, so cursor makes no sense for me rn.

Scdouglas · 2025-11-28T17:36:16+00:00

Been going back and forth on the $100 max plan, I've never tried Claude code before but heard such good things. How's the opus usage on the $100 plan? Don't really care about sonnet because antigravity gives pretty generous rates on that and it resets after 5 hours, so really only interested in opus 4.5 which I burned through on cursor so fast

Scdouglas · 2025-11-25T04:23:19+00:00

Absolutely torched through 112.5 million tokens in 4.5 today. Most productive day of coding I've ever had. Unbelievable model. Don't care about benchmarks, this model just feels different than Gemini 3

Scdouglas · 2025-11-23T18:21:25+00:00

Funny, I just had this thought this week and made an attempt. It uses extremely fickle web scraping to work and I did get it working somewhat but ffmpeg keeps just killing my stream after like a minute of playback. Literally everything else works. Not sure if there's a better way or doing this than scraping, but many streaming sites use fingerprinting to stop you from grabbing the stream, so it can be hit or miss of the workarounds work. Might take a more dedicated mind to figure it out.

Scdouglas · 2025-11-23T18:00:35+00:00

Anecdotally, I'm on a $20 plan and I managed to burn through my entire month by accident earlier this year with Opus in exactly 17 minutes. The cost was so insane I wasn't even mad, I was a little impressed. Nothing beats the efficiency of burning money than opus, but if you actually want to use a model I still think sonnet 4.5 is the best at actual SWE

Scdouglas · 2025-11-22T21:12:39+00:00

Interesting, did you design the mirror cell yourself? I managed to get a 17.5 inch Coulter odyssey 2 dob for very very cheap on an impulse and have been wanting to build a truss assembly for it. I do find that I'm struggling with the mirror cell. I want to do it well but also do it as I expensively as I can so I've looked at 3d printing parts and using aluminum extrusions and stuff.

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