Astro-imaging and timekeeping
It’s somewhat often that I see an astro-imager get befuddled with a time-related issue. Sometimes their mount will be found pointing 1 hour ahead or behind the target after being commanded to slew to the target’s coordinates. Other times an axis will inexplicably jump, or guiding will slowly degrade over Read More …
On N.I.N.A. as free and open source software
Time to time, the question of “what astrophotography software do I use?” is asked on forums. Users of various software relate their impressions and preferences and, presumably, the person who posed the question is armed with the knowledge and clarity needed to make their decision. N.I.N.A. is usually mentioned during Read More …
1Q2021 changes and improvements in NINA’s native QHY interface
I’ve been working on some improvements to NINA’s native driver for QHY cameras over the past several weeks. Part of this post is just informational in nature, explaining some new features, but there is also some important information that I want to make sure that all users of the native Read More …
Offset: the misunderstood companion to gain
Astronomy cameras, especially CMOS-based ones, bristle with features and different controls and all affect the image data that they produce in some way or another. One might think of sensor gain (or on DSLRs, ISO) as one of the most prominent and critical controls for a camera of any sort, Read More …
Introducing N.I.N.A. 1.10
After 10 months of hard work, the N.I.N.A. team, led by Stefan Berg, is proud to promote version 1.10 from active development to be the new stable release. Support ends for the prior N.I.N.A. stable, 1.9, and work on the next version, 1.11, commences. N.I.N.A. 1.10 contains several sizable new Read More …
NINA 1.8: New feature preview
NINA developer Stanley Dimant has produced a video which details and explains the many new features and refinements which will debut with the upcoming 1.8 release. Read More …
Adding QHY SDK Support to NINA
After doing some touch-ups to NINA’s integration with ZWO cameras to get familiar with coding in C# and how camera support in NINA is done, I felt ready to tackle implementing support for an entirely new camera. For this, I chose to implement native support for QHY cameras and started Read More …
elemental.org now live on IPv6
This week, I worked with my colo provider and was allotted use of 2607:f308:7::/48 – 80 bits of IPv6 address space totaling 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 IPv6 addresses to call my own. That’s one septillion, two hundred eight sextillion, nine hundred twenty-five quintillion, eight hundred nineteen quadrillion, six hundred fourteen trillion, six hundred twenty-nine billion, one Read More …
On illumos community
I had been a Sun/Solaris fan all of my professional life – I started out on a Tatung SPARCstation 5 clone running SunOS 4.1.4 which served as the main server of the small mom & pop ISP I worked for immediately out of high school. SunOS 4 turned to Solaris 2, Read More …
Fruit Bat hitches ride on the Space Shuttle
I got this forwarded to me from a friend, who got it from a friend, who has a relative working at NASA: Although we remained hopeful he would wake up and fly away, the bat eventually became IPR 119V-0080 after the ICE team finished their walkdown. He did change the direction he Read More …