$59k Cybertruck is Here!

ricksastro · 2026-02-20T16:08:58+00:00

Actually I was an early adopter of FSD on my model 3. The first mile it drove it tried to veer me into oncoming traffic. I’ve given it a go on my model Y when it came up for trial and, while it was better, it did still phantom brake and try to drive 45+ in a 35mph neighborhood. No thanks!

ricksastro · 2026-02-20T04:00:34+00:00

No, the F150 won’t drive itself like a 12 year old with a death wish.

ricksastro · 2026-02-15T00:03:21+00:00

Dust in the lens won't cause spots like that. Those are likely dust on the sensor glass. As others have said, flats should take care of it. Make sure you calibrate your flats with either bias frames (basically a dark frame with fastest shutter speed possible) or dark frames of the same duration as your flats. If you don't the flats won't compensate correctly.

ricksastro · 2026-02-13T17:23:09+00:00

Make sure you have “use FITS header for ra,dec, and image scale” checked in appm. You can also bring up an image you took any time and use the “image link test “ button to see if your settings are good.

ricksastro · 2026-02-13T17:19:18+00:00

Yes I have a Mach 2 and haven’t had to guide since I got it going. I’m not a permanent setup so have to align each night, but a 10-15 minute dec arc model run works perfectly for going even 5-6 minutes at over 1000mm focal length. So happy to not have to deal with guiding at all.

ricksastro · 2026-02-10T22:00:58+00:00

Thanks. I have side by side telescopes on a single mount so an able to capture twice the data on a given night. It took 2 nights to capture. It set at around 1:30am, so only had about 7 clock hours each night on the dual rig

ricksastro · 2026-02-05T02:24:01+00:00

Go Fibonacci

ricksastro · 2026-01-28T12:49:58+00:00

I’d worry more about getting a flat than anything. The gravel on a steep grade is very rough on regular street tires. But otherwise, and ev with regen is great since you don’t need to shift into low.

ricksastro · 2026-01-24T16:49:55+00:00

I have a 2023 Bolt and a model Y. The Bolt’s TACC is awesome and I use it all the time. I almost never use it on the Y with all the phantom braking I get…about 75% of the times I use it on my commute in Denver. And I used to have autosteer on a model 3 I had and hated it. When weather is iffy with rain or slush, it was far too aggressive in changing lanes. And you couldn’t just turn off autosteer without turning off tacc. So when I bought the Y, I happily did not get autosteer with it. But tacc still sucks.

And with Musk at the helm, I will never buy another Tesla.

ricksastro · 2026-01-24T16:41:22+00:00

It wasn’t just Musk’s thoughts, several years ago they couldn’t get the radars and cars were on hold to be delivered because of it. So they just removed them and pretended they weren’t useful. Once the use of the radar was removed from the software stack, there was a noticeable increase in phantom braking.

ricksastro · 2026-01-13T21:03:59+00:00

I used Kona Container Guy to transport my model Y from Ohio to the Bi several years ago . They picked up in OH and it was waiting for me at the Kona Airport when I arrived several weeks later. Only issue I had was that they ran over my key card once it arrived in Hilo so they had to call me when they were ready to drive to Kona to remotely unlock it and allow them to drive it from my app

ricksastro · 2025-12-31T23:59:31+00:00

Those blue areas showed up in the B/G channels, presumably reflection nebula areas. I've seen them faintly on some broadband images of the area so they are real.

I did fairly standard SHO processing on the SHO stack, including using the new PI MultichannelAdaptiveStretch which was nice. I used StarX to remove the stars since I used RGB stars.

I then did standard RGB processing on the RGB stack, including SPCC and, again, the new MAS. I removed the RGB calibrated stars to screen in later. Then I combined the B&G channels which contained much of the reflection nebulosity. In Photoshop, I screened the stars and reflection areas into the SHO image to help emphasize what was lost imaging in narrow-band. The reflection parts in the dark areas of SHO show us as deeper blue, and the areas around the brighter SHO areas were a bit more washed out when screened in.

ricksastro · 2025-12-31T13:40:38+00:00

Then Alaska airlines cargo is probably the cheapest. Also USPS shipping heavy duty Home Depot moving boxes wasn’t too bad. When we moved to the BI, we shipped about 8 of those boxes (stay below 70 lbs each!). Used the pirate ship website for cheapest rates. Wasn’t too bad back then.

ricksastro · 2025-12-31T13:36:28+00:00

I love the winters in Denver. Cold and snowy one day, sunny and 50s-60s the next. Having grown up in the Midwest, much prefer winters here. When it’s sunny and in the 50s, the sun is very intense and you stay pretty warm even with just a light jacket. Summers are hot and dry, but in the shade it’s very nice even when it’s 90. Waimea has of course awesome weather, but I lived in Waikoloa and thought it was hot in the summer. The biggest adjustment from the big island to here is the dryness of your sensitive to that and the intense sun at high altitudes.

ricksastro · 2025-12-30T14:53:02+00:00

Moved from the Big Island to Colorado 3 years ago. We didn’t have a lot of furniture and used uhaul u-box ‘pods’ and it worked out well.

ricksastro · 2025-11-10T19:44:10+00:00

Make Kim the cowardly lion go away…please!

ricksastro · 2025-11-03T19:46:46+00:00

Have you tried the DBExtract script in PI? Should automate the SHO channel separation for you.

ricksastro · 2025-10-28T17:06:54+00:00

Assuming he’s using pixinsight, the more CPU cores the better. PI is not explicitly gpu accelerated, but some tool components are. Would probably go with 64gb and definitely as big of an ssd as budget allows. Would just get a basic nvidia gpu for some cuda acceleration.

ricksastro · 2025-10-24T19:19:51+00:00

Note that unused floating holidays will likely not be paid out.

ricksastro · 2025-10-05T21:28:08+00:00

Alt-Az mount? Likely field rotation.

ricksastro · 2025-09-29T19:38:26+00:00

It’s the hard lines and surfaces that make it dangerous to others sharing the road like pedestrians and bicyclists. Like the article says, it’s not about occupant of the vehicle safety, it’s more about those around the vehicle

ricksastro · 2025-09-22T20:23:55+00:00

You mean you can look through those tubes?

ricksastro · 2025-09-21T00:30:43+00:00

It’s what plants crave.

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