TheMightyEthan

Yes, I am planning to travel for the 2024 eclipse. My plan is to ahead of time book two hotels in the path of totality a few hundred miles apart, and then a day or two before pick the one with the best forecast go there. There's another Mercury transit in 2032 and 2039, but I'd have to fly to Europe to see those, which I don't think I'm going to do.

Well, I was all set to view the transit, but then the sky looked like this all morning: The next transit of Mercury won't be visible from the US until 2049...

That seems unnecessarily expensive.

The redesign looks so much better. The movie still looks awful, but Sonic himself at least looks decent now. A little disappointed he's still not a cyclops though...

Yeah, but then you can't re-sell it after you play it...

Built my solar filter for my telescope. Isn't it fancy? I bought some solar filter film and two plexiglass discs. I sandwiched the film between the discs (because the film scratches really easily), trimmed it to shape, then hot-glued around the outside seam to make the filter itself. Then I used some spare soda and cereal boxes to construct a sleeve to hold it on the telescope. The main problem I've found so far is that the plexiglass is super staticky, so it attracts dust really badly, although it doesn't seem to much of an impact on the photos. Here are the results: And an bonus one with some clouds just because I think it looks cool: I'm all set to observe the transit of Mercury tomorrow morning, except it looks like it's going to be super cloudy... ?

Played a couple hours of The Outer Worlds. It definitely feels like a New Vegas spiritual successor. I'm really enjoying it so far.

Got Xbox Game Pass for PC because it's $1 for the first month, and I want to play: The Outer Worlds! I still have Ni No Kuni on my backlog, but I want a break from JRPGs after just finishing my third playthrough of Fire Emblem and Pokemon coming out in a week..

Wouldn't be the first time a game got poached by EGS after having preorders up on Steam.

More astrophotography! Also I think it's probably time this got its own thread... First up is the Moon. These two shots were taken an hour or so apart, both by taking a video and then using software to refine it into a single image. The crazy thing to me is that even over such a short period of time, if you look closely you can see that the terminator (the line between light and dark) has moved noticeably across the Moon's surface. It's especially noticeable on the three big craters right on the line, just a little below the center of the image. (Also this time I've reduced the image sizes in Photoshop before uploading so hopefully they don't upset the forum quite so bad. If I'm feeling motivated I'll go back and do the same on the pictures in the previous posts.) Another crazy thing is how much better the images come out if I take a video and then stack it, rather than just a single picture. Here's a single still shot of the Moon for comparison: It's way blurrier, even though it's the same optics and a much higher capture resolution (5184x3456 for the photo, vs 1920x1080 for the video). The main problem is the atmosphere, when looking through the scope directly, or watching one of the videos, you can see the objects shimmering due to atmospheric disturbance, and that shows up in the stills too. But with a video you can average it all out and come out with something that's a lot clearer than any individual image. Moving on, I also took another shot of Jupiter with much higher magnification (again by stacking a video), and it came out so much better. I am absolutely in love with this picture. I was shocked by how well it came out, because it was very low on the horizon at the time, so I was looking through a whole lot of atmosphere. The video I used to make that was about 9 minutes long though, and at 30 frames a second that's a lot of image data to stack. This is the maximum magnification I can get with my current equipment, so to get anything better I'll need a new eyepiece for the telescope. Just for shits and giggles I also redid the composite image with the new and improved Jupiter shot. I tried to image Saturn at that same magnification (about 2x my pictures from last time) but it's just not bright enough (the 2x multiplier lens also cuts the amount of light in half), so all I could get was an amorphous blob.so And last but certainly not least, I tried taking a picture of Andromeda: That's just a single 10-second exposure that I processed the hell out of. I wanted to do a longer exposure, but I must not have had the telescope lined up quite right, so I kept getting star trails (where the stars turn into lines on long exposures). In fact even at 10-seconds most of my pictures had trails in them, this one the only usable one, which was a bummer, because I was hoping to try out another piece of software that is made for stacking images of dimmer objects like this. I'll try again in the future, hopefully with some longer exposures and more usable pictures. I'm really looking forward to Monday, when Mercury is going to transit the Sun, which only happens about every 13 years. I ordered a sheet of solar filter film, which is supposed to get here tomorrow, and I'm going to make it into a cover for the telescope so I can do direct solar imaging without blinding myself or ruining my equipment.

As soon as I make a little progress through my backlog I'm planning to subscribe to Xbox All Access on PC for Outer Worlds.

That's just...

Dude, I think there's definite progress there. Besides, faces are like the hardest thing to draw, and it's only been a month.

Yeah, that is the best way to get cooperation from those people kinds of people in my work: just point out that they're probably doing it to other people too.

On time two years in a row! Post in this thread by November 22 to sign up, and by November 25 I will assign each person a giftee to rain generosity upon. Rules: Digital gifts only, typically Steam since it's the easiest to mess around with wishlists and gifting on. Other services/gift cards are fine though. There will be a separate wishlist thread to help you figure out what your target likes. Make sure your Steam wishlist/other wishlists are up to date. Suggested price of $10, though under or over is not against the rules. What this means is, don't expect a $60 gift--if your Santa gets you a $5 gift that's on your wishlist, that's all they're required to do. But if you're feeling ultra-rich or ultra-generous, we won't thumb our noses at higher priced presents. Multiple gifts are fine, but by no means required. Gifting period will officially commence alongside the Steam Winter Sale, which is rumored to begin December 19 this year. You can gift earlier though if you find a killer deal (or just can't restrain your excitement ?). Gifting deadline will be on or around the end of the Steam sale, which should be January 2. If you don't get your gift by then, message me. No brand new members (signing up after this message) unless I or another mod approves you. Have fun! Ho ho ho!

I remember playing Tales of Destiny on the PS1, and playing for like 10 hours, and defeating the up-till-then Big Bad, and thinking I'd beat the game, and then the opening credits started... (I was young and it was my first JRPG, I had no perspective on how long to expect it to be.)

Well, the EU renegotiated the deal they said they wouldn't renegotiate. They're saying this deal is take it or leave it and not up to renegotiation, but, as I said before: But really, parliament passed the "in principal" resolution, so I expect after the elections (which the Tories look set to win pretty soundly, if you can trust polling data) Parliament will pass the implementation legislation and the UK actually will leave by the end of January.

HE STOLE $3,000 FROM HER! As a prosecutor people like her drive me nuts. I admire their magnanimity, but sometimes people who commit crimes need to be convicted of them...

Don't just sue, she should call the cops, that's a crime.

Preordered Pokemon Sword, even though there's no way I'm going to get through Golden Deer and Ni No Kuni before November 15...

No Boba Fett movie can ever top the original.

That is a bro move to announce PC before the PS4 launch.

Got the mount to hook my camera to my telescope, so I went back out and took some more pictures of Jupiter and Saturn. This first one is just a raw picture of Jupiter from the camera through the telescope, with the exposure adjusted on the camera to show as many of the moons as possible: Then we have a much shorter exposure time photo of Jupiter, to try to get as much detail as possible (not much detail, but you can at least see the color): After that I started experimenting with taking videos, which I can feed into some free astrophotography software to get these: Then I can do some Photoshop compositing to yield: Which is actually pretty close to what it looks like in person through the eyepiece of the telescope. Then I moved on to Saturn. Again, the first picture is just a direct shot through the telescope: Then take a video, run it through some processing (and also apply a 2x barlow lens, which I forgot to do with Jupiter, and the result is): That last one actually might be clearer than it looks in person. The reason all the processed ones are angled opposite from the direct shot ones is that the telescope has an odd number of mirrors, which means the image you see is left-right reversed, so when I was doing the processing I fixed that. Next I want to try Jupiter again through the barlow, to hopefully get even more detail. I also want to try some longer videos. The longest one I took last night is the one that resulted in that last Saturn picture, and it was just under 2 minutes long. The longer the video the more frames the software has to work with, so the better it can correct for atmospheric disturbances and the like, and the better the resulting picture.

Game pass is a sweet ass deal.