TheMightyEthan

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.

@Mr. GOH! I'm pretty sure you've said each of the last three games you've played is GOTY ?

Both TFA and TLJ were movies that I liked a lot when I first saw them, but that as time has passed I've started to feel less and less positive toward.

Yeah, I'd go ahead and pack any empty space in your freezer with ice, that way it's already there in the event you lose power.

Yeah, FE3H definitely takes a while to pick up, but I'm working my way through my third playthrough and I'm not sick of it yet.

From what I've been reading they understand that it's because they rushed it out so it's competing with the last Ghost Recon which has been developed more throughout its life. It's similar to Destiny 2 and how people were disappointed it seemed pared back compared to Destiny 1.

Wow, that's awful.

Even The Last Jedi though was basically just Empire Strikes Back in reverse, so it didn't exactly get away from the original trilogy. I did like it though.

Yeah, I would not be getting into it nearly as much as I am if I hadn't been able to get my grandpa's telescope. I bet if I were to buy new all the equipment I got from him it would cost $6,000-$7,000. Of course he bought it 30 years ago, but still, it's in great shape and is obviously extremely high quality.

It's almost like there are massive structural problems with the way the world is organized that those in power have been ignoring for decades.

Observed again Saturday night. No pictures because I don't have the camera mount yet, but we looked at Jupiter and Saturn again. We could see four of Jupiter's moons clearly, and even see some cloud banding on Jupiter itself. I think I saw the Great Red Spot for a second, but am not sure about that, the view was fairly wobbly due to Jupiter being close to the day/night terminator and so a lot of temperature change going on, plus it was pretty low in the sky so I was looking through a lot of atmosphere. It was the coolest thing I've ever seen, until we changed the view to Saturn. Saturn was farther into the night side and higher in the sky, so the view was clearer, and while we couldn't see any cloud banding we could very distinctly see the rings. I'm really excited to get the camera mount, which should hopefully be later this week. Finally, we tried to look at Neptune, and I'm about 51% sure we found it. I forgot to try my barlow lens, so we were only looking at it with 160x magnification, and at that level Neptune is far enough away that you can't see it's a disk, it just looks like a blue star, so it's possible we were in fact just looking at a blue star in the same general area as where Neptune is supposed to be. At the 320x I can get with the barlow we should be able to see that it's a disk and confirm if we're actually looking at the right thing. I also realized I screwed up the math above, and that crater picture is actually about 320x magnification, while the big picture of the moon is about 80x. The new eyepiece I ordered should have 50x magnification, which will allow me to see the whole of big targets like the Moon or Andromeda all at once (as you can see above the Moon is slightly too big to get all in the frame at 80x magnification). If I get my stuff in time I want to try to go out of town this weekend to look at Andromeda without as much light pollution.

Sounds like how our military apparently feels about getting suddenly pulled out of Syria and abandoning the Kurds.

Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean it was weird that the initial operation got overwhelmed, I could totally imagine that happening here. What I meant was if something like that happened in the US they could easily call in enough forces to impose order after the fact.

*Edit - I'm not sure why some of the pictures are showing as broken links, but if you just click on them it will open it to a working one. Updated picture of Jupiter and 3 of its moons from the other night using the remote so I didn't jostle the camera (this is actually about 50 pictures that I stacked using astrophotography software to get a clearer image): And here's the same picture without cropping: I also took some at lower exposure lengths and iso settings to try to see the planet itself without it being all blown out like that, so here are those results (also stacked images to clean it up): And the same thing on Saturn for good measure (it's really cool to me how Jupiter looks like a circle but you can see Saturn definitely isn't): I'm still experimenting and learning how to do it to get good pictures (as you can see in the Jupiter-with-moons picture I could have used a shorter exposure because even the moons are kind of blown out), but I just got my grandpa's 10" telescope (2000mm focal length) and ordered an adapter for my camera to hook it straight into that, so that should way up the quality (the zoom lense I've been using is only 300mm focal length). Until that adapter arrives, here's a picture I took of the Moon this morning by just putting my phone camera up to the telescope's eyepiece: That's the lowest level of magnification I can get with the eyepieces I have right now for the telescope. I took some more at the highest magnification (about 200x): The phone picture really doesn't do it justice, it looked much better in person through the eyepiece (so did the first one, although that one I processed with some astronomy software to get it closer to what it looked like for real). At this magnification though the surface looked shimmery due to atmospheric interference, I think because there was a lot of moisture in the air, and it was about 9:00 am so the temperature was warming up pretty rapidly. I'm going to try again tonight to see Jupiter and Saturn. I don't have the camera adapter yet though so sadly any pictures I take will have to be the phone-to-eyepiece method.

As I posted in the other thread, I have been messing around with astrophotography, and I had kind of reached the limit of what I can accomplish without better equipment. Well my grandpa had a 10" telescope that he doesn't use anymore, and said I could have. That's awesome, but I've been messing with that and with the eyepieces he had the lowest magnification I'm able to get is about 80x (magnification is scope focal length divided by eyepiece focal length), which means you're only looking at a very tiny piece of the sky and it can make it hard to find specific targets. So I bought an eyepiece with a longer focal length to reduce magnification to help me find specific objects, and then once I have them locked in I can switch out for higher magnification if I want. The other thing is an adapter to allow me to connect my Canon Rebel T4 camera that I already had (that's what I've been using so far with a 300mm zoom lens) directly into the telescope.

It's such an alien concept to me for the military to not have the capacity to just walk in and lock everything down if they wanted it.

I'm not knocking your decision to get the Lite, because it sounds like you have good reasons, but I do want to say that on my OG Switch that I've taken good care of the joycons when docked feel like they're all part of on thing, they don't feel separate. Definitely doesn't slip in a pocket though...

I've always been one to feel the FOMO on the seasonal stuff, but Destiny has a tendency of making all the old stuff obsolete with each new expansion anyway so you're really not going to miss out on much. *Edit - I just realized I never bought Forsaken. I'd be tempted, but it's still $25, and that plus Shadowkeep would be a full $60...

No, I still have my save.

Oh no, I hope I don't still have to have the cartridge, I traded it in for Link's Awakening...

I see a few more people have picked up the game now that the base part is free, so if a group gets going that plays regularly let me know, that might be enough to get me to get Shadowkeep.

Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch for Switch. I decided portability was more important to me than resolution.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses Golden Deer path. Once more unto the breach...