Quote from: xhomerx10 on June 28, 2022, 11:47:35 PM

The image is 4.36 megs and you're limited to 2.5 - that's the problem. I changed the compression to 73% so there's no way it will look as awesome as it should... people should follow your link instead.

Damn, OOM! Learn the bitcointalk basics and fucking remember them, will you!? Angry

Quote from: xhomerx10 on June 28, 2022, 11:51:55 PM

My wife thought we were playing another game of "Wall Observer where am I?"

Hey, i got a starry sky pic including a nearby foreground, so if i publish the datetime (UTC+0) with it, one may be able to find out the rough location through maths and science.
Maybe proudhon can help? Cheesy

Quote from: cAPSLOCK on Today at 12:23:35 AM

Much obliged... my new setup thanks to you!

Looks nice! I should provide you a new version of the first (left screen) photo, which is somewhat poorly color corrected, compared to the second one (right screen).

Quote from: Biodom on Today at 12:37:50 AM

Awesome pic.
So many stars!

I wonder if all (or almost all) of these are empty worlds. Seems like a waste of space, but on the other hand, where is "magic" in the sky?
Certainly, there is nothing out there that "looks" like like an advanced civilization of Kardashev scale >2.0
Normally, a civilization that is growing at 3% a year in energy consumption, should reach type 1 (from current 0.73) in 100-200 years, type 2 in a few thousand years and type 3 in a 100K-million years.

Not all stars appeared at the same time. In fact there are many stars in the Milky way that are billions of years older than our Sun.

If it takes "only" about a million years for a tech civilization to reach type 3 (with projects on the galaxy size) and there were MANY stars older than Sun.
In fact, one paper suggests that an average star with a habitable zone is 3.3bil years OLDER than our Sun.

The sad conclusion is that NO ONE has made it to be past stage 2 (at least).
References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1509/1509.02832.pdf

Interesting facts, though.
I truly wonder how long it would take to actually unite mankind in peacefulness to make these types of tech civilization only virtually possible. Always have to think about "Idicracy" when looking at the state of civilization and where we're possibly going to...

As of "so many stars"... On this image i even smoothed about 20-30% of the more faint and smaller bright objects to clear it up and emphasize the h-Alpha (about 660 nanometer wavelength, mainly the red parts) emitting nebula. After only a couple of tries and processing sessions the results improved quite well, so far. I should really remaster the older shots to look even better. It's kinda funny after years of "image editing" to switch to "light data processing". And best of all are the hours you spend watching the nighr to the sound of hundreds of crickets and the camera periodically opening/closing the shutter.

Our oh-so-big, modern, advanced existence is not even a ladies fart in the timespace of the universe Cool

Quote from: JayJuanGee on Today at 02:11:40 AM

Quote from: OutOfMemory on June 28, 2022, 11:14:29 PM

Quote from: JayJuanGee on June 28, 2022, 05:51:10 PM

[Edited out]

Roughly steps into the dedicated astro camera area would cost me between $2k and $10k, depending on quality. Not the amount i'm used to throw at my hobbies too often.

Chump-change.

A mere 0.1BTC to 0.5BTC... are we talking ant quantities of monies, here?

Cheesy

Good that you pointed that out. I came short about the details, so far, let's elaborate

My personal fear&greed index is at 100 now. Surviving the post 2017 bear market (and you WO dudes, ok.. most of you) taught me how to turn into a (healthy) toxic maxi, and if you remember, i'm hodling most corn for my children. I'm altruistic in a way that makes me able to live a minimalistic live (relatively spoken, owning photography gear in the ranges of $10k+), but i learned to consume less and still enjoy life. In my teens, my mum threw me out, so i learned to live with my bare hands in my pockets, and i totally abandoned pride, which i will be ever thankful for. Do YOU hear me EXPHorizon? You can do it too, without the fucking begging
I financed the expansion of the family house, using bitcoin in the 2019/20 bull, so my spendable budget is used up, and i chose to wait for bullish times again until i cash out a part of what i'm putting into BTC in the usual lump sum manner, which keeps me from spending my fiat on other things.

As of the setup, i promised to go into detail here as well...
I got a tracking mount (travel mount) which carries about 10 pounds of gear, and still tracks the stars well with up to 200m focal length, until weight gets an issue. 300mm+ optics are either heavy or dark and thus need a lot of working hours to produce adequate zoom-in quality results. It's wise to load the mount with only 50% of max weight, so i'm bound to this range for now. Then there's resolution and noise, the two main power-edge criterions of image clarity. Astro cameras are cooled, sport a high signal-to-noise ratio with four times higher resolution. The pixels on the sensor are a lot smaller. These things "see more" than my DSLR camera, even more so in the monochrome CCD variants, which need many stacked shots with different color/wavelength filtering to produce remotely comparable color pictures to NASA's works. And there's big sensor sizes driving the price barriers upwards significantly.
This includes higher grade optics, which introduce weight, which cries for accuracy and stability measures. Heavier tripods, bigger mounts, small secondary scopes tracking a singe star, parallel to the main scope/camera setup, controlled by software running on a decent laptop suited for cold/humid environment.
If i had $50k to spend mindlessly on this, it would take me only about an hour in multiple online shops. Sure, i'd like to, since i compulsively dive into this "hobby" like i've done regarding all my hobbies before, but i have to start somewhere without sacrifying my corn at this state of market.
Maybe it's an obsession, but it's certainly a good one. At least i hope so Cheesy

We are all good liars when it comes to lie to ourselves, though.

Most of my current camera lenses enable me to catch decent results with the modified DSLR and realtively low effort. The good thing is that i have a lot to learn on processing light data, so it would be a waste of time and money to set up new gear at a higher level now. Until then i'm bound to live the Bitcoin Gollum life, taking care of my precious treasure. But there will be times when i move into some thousands of dollars to step up the astro game. It would be foolish to do it right now, in more than one way, you see? And then, finally, i will easily exchange that 0.01 - 0.001 of Bitcoin to suit the monetary needs of upgrading.
Sure, there's a second-hand market for gear, but those astrographers take so much care about their stuff, the advantage in price is little.
I would so much more want to rent an observatory to work in on certain nights, but that's not possible in "locational nearby" terms. Imagine $million tech at your fingertips, for a fraction of the money and no need to put up/put down/stow away things, just get inside, turn up the heating, power up the gear, get calibrating and going for very distant spots of the observable universe's faintest of objects. Real beuty.

If Russia and all don't get too desperate in near time, we gonna spend some years and decades here on the forum, so you will see improving results over time, accompanied by tech debate revealing mind boggling facts about space, time and the universe Grin