Category: Geekery
Luddites beware.
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 …
QHY294C Pro conversion
I bought a QHYCCD QHY294C in 2017 and have been using it on top of my main imaging rig as a secondary camera, as well as a test subject for the development of the native QHY driver in N.I.N.A. Its normal astrophotography configuration has it attached to a Canon EF 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 …
Introducing NINA: An astrophotography sequencing suite
I have been involved in a new opensource project over the past several months called Nighttime Imaging ‘N’ Astronomy (“NINA”). NINA is ground-breaking both in the hobby of amateur astrophotography and personally. An artifact of several historical reasons, the world of computer-controlled astrophotography is dominated by Windows applications. As such, 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 …
Portugal vacation photos
Photos from my two week trip to Portugal to see the country and attend Boom Festival are up. Various places in Portugal Boom Festival 2008 photos
About
Hello! I’m Dale Ghent, a Systems Engineer living in the Washington, DC area. I tend to focus on the illumos-based operating systems OmniOSce and SmartOS on a wide variety of x86 hardware. My experience with these, Solaris and other UNIX-like operating systems such as the BSD family and various Linux distributions stretches back to 1994. Read More …