Recent content by collinsmark

A bit of weird trivia about this (this is the Weird News thread, so it's almost on topic): Chekov wasn't a character in Star Trek's first season. The episode Space Seed, where the Enterprise first meets up with Kahn, was in the first season. So Chekov shouldn't have ever met Kahn. Yet in the...

I know! For the past several days I've been anticipating late night talk show monologues (e.g. Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, etc.) to make reference to this Wrath of Kahn scene. But alas, no.

Right. I've given that idea some thought, but I'm not sure I trust my skill with such tools. Yes, the "too tall" culprit involves some plastic, cylindrical spacers/shoulders. I suppose they could be sawed down to half their length, and also machining the ends of the screws to compensate. Then...

Collimation screw, side project: So I decided to give Bob's Knobs a try. Here's a summary on how that went. Background: Collimation is important on any Cassegrain telescope system. Collimation is the alignment between the primary mirror, secondary mirror, and final image location. Ideally...

Revenge of the fifth.

OK., I concede that maybe the non-parallel shadow property is an illusion resulting from the pixel aliasing in the upper parts of the image. If you enlarge the image, the shadows become aliased after around the second, structural rail. This aliasing might make it appear that the shadows are not...

That might rule out AI. But Photoshop (or similar) and ray tracing have been around for decades. It may be a real bridge, but with the shadows in the image manipulated in a Photoshop (or Photoshop-like) program, such that the actual shadows were replaced (via "Clone Stamp" and "Free Transform"...

I'm guessing the shaded side is to reduce the visibility of one of the doubles, to help compensate for the Jameson.

I suspect the image isn't real. As in, I think it's most likely photoshopped or ray traced or maybe AI generated. Here's my logic, in two parts: (1) The vertical posts are vertically parallel. When illuminated by a very distant light source (like the sun) they should produce parallel shadows...

Yep. There's truth to this. I've known about this for about a month now, being as I try to keep up on such things since I build my own computers. It's worse than causing "crashes," though: it places the CPU (and indirectly the associated cooling systems) at a too aggressive operating point that...

Does the app use GPS to track her route? If so, I would expect it would be pretty accurate (i.e., the 0.698 m/step would have been calculated based on the GPS measured length of the route*, and not the other way around). * Edit: and the number of steps, which can be recorded and counted based...

That's an important question worthy of discussion. The answer isn't simple. If I had to give a short answer it's this: the color saturation that I used in this image is higher than what would normally be used in a terrestrial photograph. And the color saturation that I used in my photo is...

I've got more data! :smile: Here's M100 (a.k.a., NGC 4321, "The Blowdryer Galaxy," "The Mirror Galaxy") with about 37 hours of data and a lot more care with post-processing. (It's the same target as before, just with more data and more care.) Not only did I gather more L, R, G, B data, but I...

The Blowdryer Galaxy (a.k.a., M100, NGC 4321, Mirror Galaxy), imaged from my back patio, March-April 2024. The galaxy is about 56 million light-years away and can be found in the constellation Coma Berenices. Figure 1. M100. I understand the "Mirror Galaxy," nickname, due to its symmetry I...

Tell me about it. It's been this way for awhile now. (We might have a clear night next week though. Maybe. But the comet will be too close to the horizon for my setup though.) Regarding 12P/Pons-Brooks (the "Devil's Comet"), Over a month ago I did attempt to plan out (using Stellarium) a good...