4,926 karma · joined February 6, 2016
Unfortunately I'm in a Bortle 5 to 6 area so I'd need quite a bit of integration time to get a decent SnR. There aren't really any proper dark sites in western Europe.
The nice thing about deep space objects is that they don't change at a rate that there is any visible difference over timespans relevant to humans. This means that you can do very, very long exposures. It also means that you don't need to capture all colours at once.
The linked article talks about using a color camera with a bayer matrix that uses dyed glass to get color data and how the filters don't filter out light in the 800-1000nm range.
Lots of amateur astrophotographers don't use color camera's but monochrome cameras in combination with separate filters. These filters are of much higher quality than the dye based filters used on camera sensors. Instead of dyes they use interference filters[1]. These filters do not have the same issue as described in the article. For example the LRGB filter set I use only lets through a 100nm band for each color. Next to that you can use filter that only let through emissions from specific elements, like the HSO filters mentioned (Hydrogen-alpha, Sulphur-II, Oxygen-III). In my case I have filters with a bandwidth of 3nm around the emission line of each of these elements.
The bigger issue with making these photo's look like what they 'really look like' is that they really look like nothing at all. The light from these objects is so faint that even with a highly sensitive cooled camera you need many hours of exposure to grab enough data to make a nice picture. What they 'really look like' to the human eye is black.
The issue is worse when you add in the narrowband data, because that overlaps with the visible spectrum, but in that case you usually emphasise certain bands to stand out more in the final picture. It's not uncommon to combine the LRGB data with e.g. H-alpha data.
In the end the colours you choose are up to the photographer and their goals. Are you just going for a pretty picture or are you trying to visualize scientific data?
Since puppies turn into full grown dogs quite quickly, how often do you suggest I replace the puppy?
> We created an animal which was perfectly acclimated to human companionship
This is why I think having a cat is so much more satisfying. A dog loves you unconditionally, not by choice but because it was literally bred to do so. Despite this you still have to keep it on a leash. Cats by contrast stay with you because they want to, despite having every opportunity to move in with someone else.
It’s not enough to be as good as the competition when they already have an established ecosystem of apps and accessories. To be successful you have to leapfrog the competition. You need to offer something so compelling that consumers are willing to put up with the inconvenience of the lack of ecosystem. This is why WebOS and BlackBerry 10 failed. They were as good as iOS and Android but not good enough to overcome that massive downside.
This is also why Apple managed to get a foothold even though established players like Nokia and RIM had the market cornered. Instead of catching up to the competition they leapfrogged them.
Especially the smaller self-publishing developers won't benefit from this at all. It's just the large publishers like Epic who can afford the developer resources to build their own payment systems who have something to gain here.
Apple’s rules leveled the playing field. All this ruling does is give a competitive advantage to the big fish.
No, it's very much a technology issue. The overhead just for shipping an entire webbrowser with your app is insane. Building a decent UI in HTML/CSS which were never designed for that purpose, is an absolute disaster. HTML and CSS are for formatting text documents, not for designing user interfaces. There is a reason that there is a framework-of-the-week for webapps.
So now you have this massive webbrowser footprint, with the framework-of-the-week on top and then you have to write your app on top of this abomination in one of the most terrible languages ever invented.
The whole 'webapp' thing exists solely on the false promise of cost savings. Every kid who made a webpage for their aunt's Etsy business calls themselves a 'web designer', which has resulted in a race to the bottom. Web designer are a dime a dozen (sure, a good one may cost a pretty penny, but that's not what management sees). Now you can hire that cheap 'web designer' and they can build apps too, since that's just web tech, right? And since it all works cross-platform, you only need to build it once. What a cost savings!
They will even get an initial version out the door quickly. Look, everything worked out as expected. The problem is that it's quicksand. Your app grows and it gets harder and harder to fix issues and add features, as it's all build on shaky foundations. The more you move, the more difficult it becomes. Soon, you find yourself writing platform-specific code as the cross-platform promise doesn't hold for anything but the simplest functionality. Before you know it, you have this bloated, unmaintainable mess.
At the end of the day, it's easier and cheaper to just develop 2 native apps for iOS/Android than it is to build a 'webapp'. You can use nice, modern programming languages with very few footguns (Swift/Kotlin), good tooling, a UI toolkit designed to actually build UIs with, a set of well designed platform APIs. The whole cross-platform web-app thing sounds nice in theory, but it never delivers on its promises.
You're confusing developers with publishers. Developers love this shit, one simple API that's built in to the OS and you can support payments worldwide instead of having to integrate with dozens of payment providers all with their own quirky APIs.
Now for publishers, who want to maximise their profit margins and who don't have to actually write the code to do all those integrations, that's a different story. But I don't think there is a single developer in the world who enjoys integrating with 3rd party payment services.
They really haven't.
'Web apps' are terrible, both from an end-user and developer perspective. They are a bloated, overcomplicated mess.
Not just better value for money, I often find that AliExpress sells things I simply cannot find anywhere else.
A recent example: I was looking for something to balance the 3rd axis on my telescope, There are very few products on the market from mainstream brands and none were what I needed. On Ali I easily found several options. These are basically just machined pieces of metal so not really anything than can break.
Same goes for storage bags and cases. You can often find a bag or case specifically made for your device, while there isn’t anything for sale locally.
In astronomy/astrophotography the FITS format[1] is commonly used, which supports all these things and is, as the name suggests, extremely flexible. I wonder why it never caught on in regular photography.
Summers are getting hot, to the point where it’s uncomfortable to be outside while the sun is out. It’s barely tolerable in the shade, assuming you don’t move too much. It only gets comfortable outdoors after sunset. During workweeks this means you barely have any usable outdoor time before you need to go to sleep. It also means your bedroom has little chance to cool down before you need to go to bed. Summer nights are nice when you’re outdoors, but DST robs us of the best hours to be outside.
If we’re going to move the clock in summer, we should move it backwards another hour. It would mean 2 more hours (compared to the current DST) of nice summer nights, instead of extra hours of scorching sunlight. I suggest we call it ‘Moonlight Saving Time’.
The App Store was an absolute revolution for mobile app developers. It is hard to overstate how much of an improvement it was over the status quo. People are complaining about Apple taking a 30% cut; it used to be that the operators took a 70% cut. Not for hosting an app store, no, just for sending the reverse-billing SMS message with the install link. You had to host it yourself, there was no store so you had to advertise your app to make it discoverable. You had to arrange (and pay for) a shortcode and SMS provider for every single country you wanted to sell in. You had to write and host code to handle the incoming message on the shortcode and respond with a RB-SMS.
Next to that, the SDK’s were absolute dogshit, phone manufacturers didn’t give a shit about apps and the phones themselves were riddled with bugs (with the notable exception of SonyEricsson, their J2ME environment was excellent). Symbian was a PITA to develop for, BlackBerry was actively developer-hostile (unless you happened to be a Fortune-500 company). Samsung phones were an absolute disaster, every single phone model had a unique set of bugs you had to find workarounds for.
So in comes Apple, they charge only 30% and for that you get a nice SDK, an App Store that distributes your app, makes it discoverable and handles payments worldwide with zero extra effort. We were thrilled when they announced it, and rightfully so.
Google then followed suit with the Play Store, effectively matching what Apple was doing.
So yeah, Apple deserves some thanks for what they did with the App Store.
With what? Left over nukes from the cold war that haven't been maintained in decades? I would be surprised if Russia had 1 working nuke left.
Now these were conventional weapons, guns, tanks, trucks, etcetera. Stuff that you could imagine being used at some point, so there was some risk of being found out.
Now imagine you are a Russian general in charge of maintaining the nuclear stockpile. Weapons that you can reasonably expect never to be actually used. Even better, if you ever get in a situation where they would be used, it's basically the end of the world and no one is going to be alive to care if you pocketed the maintenance money anyway. How much of the allocated maintenance budget do you expect to have been spent on actual maintenance?
The MRZ can only contain the characters A-Z (uppercase), 0-9 and <. ICAO document 9303-3 describes conventions for transliteration of other characters into this limited character set.
While I don’t condone violence that is not the only possible consequence. If you call me an asshole that is your right, but if I disinvite you from the party I was planning as a result that is not a ‘free speech issue’.
They literally supported this since iPhone OS 1.0 (it wasn’t even called iOS yet). In fact, it was supposed to be the only way to add apps to the iPhone until people complained and started jailbreaking to install their own apps. Apple didn’t release the App Store and the iOS SDK until iPhone OS 2.0