JamesF

Elon Musk: "At least the crater is in the right place". James

Probably easier to work out where it isn't :) James

Oh dear. That's going to take a bit of tidying up. James

Well, I'm at a bit of a loss to explain this now... The Altair cameras I can test against the latest Astroberry generally work. The exception is one that has had support dropped from the Altair SDK and therefore won't work anywhere (though as previously mentioned I have hacked support for it, in a fairly ugly way). My code doesn't have a clue what camera is actually connected -- it just asks the Altair SDK for frame size, what controls are available and so on -- so if it works for one then in theory it ought to work for all, but perhaps I have subconsciously made some assumption that just isn't true for these particular cameras. Or perhaps there's some issue in the SDK that means they won't work in streaming mode (which is different from how INDI uses them as far as I recall), but I struggle to believe that. Unfortunately there's no way for me to work on that directly without access to the specific camera in question. If anyone can do that for me then that's great, though it's probably only really practical if you're really comfortable with Linux. Otherwise I'll have to look at what logging I can add to the code to help debug this problem in the next release. James

Yeah, but they only put something on over their t-shirts there when it's so cold that your tongue sticks to a lamppost if you lick it. James

Or possibly the final throes of suicide... James

If I'd not happened to see this thread I'd have completely forgotten about the clocks changing :D James

I'm not sure I'd recommend the books, by the way. I suspect they'd have been improved if he'd had an editor who told him to keep the plot, but get rid of half the words :) James

This thread calls to mind Cixin Liu's "The Three Body Problem" :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_communication#Quantum_entanglement Perhaps also relevant regarding the radio silence is his "Dark Forest Theory" from the same series of books, though I'm fairly sure the idea doesn't originate with him. I can't find a particularly good explanation online so perhaps this will have to do to start with: https://thoughtcatalog.com/christine-stockton/2021/02/heres-what-the-dark-forest-theory-is-and-why-its-so-terrifying/ I think the underlying principle however is that any given civilisation can't be sure of knowing how an alien civilisation might behave towards them before that alien civilisation has the potential to know of their own existence. James

My concern is that I can't be sure where the Qt toolkit would decide to save all the program settings when run via sudo, nor exactly how it would do that. There may be a risk that it would overwrite the normal user's settings leaving them owned by root, which would probably then mess things up when oacapture was run normally. I don't know it would happen. Unfortunately neither do I know that it definitely wouldn't as I've had similar things happen once or twice with other applications. I'd have to try it and see. I've now found the SD card with my Astroberry installation again, so I can look at testing some more things out based on today's findings. James

I'm thinking at this point that one of the things I need to add for a future release, preferably as soon as possible, is some fairly verbose logging of what is going on internally. James

It doesn't say anything more that is helpful then. Oh well. James

It shouldn't (he says It might be interesting to try, but I'm not sure that it wouldn't potentially mess up the saved configuration for oacapture, so probably isn't a good idea unless you'd be comfortable fixing that if it did. James

Well, it's the right thing to do, but there's not as much output as I was hoping for. That may however be a clue in itself, so I'll check a few things out here. James

Just open a terminal window, type "oacapture" and press return. Then proceed as normal when the application starts. If you can screenshot whatever appears in the terminal window, that would be great. James

Looks like it might have been scrubbed for today? Can't find any official confirmation though. James

I'd completely forgotten about this today, so I'm glad I didn't miss it. James

Just had another thought for those who still have Altair cameras that aren't working... Could you run oacapture from the command line and paste any output it gives in the terminal window, please? James

Who said that? James

Sorry, this one: Apologies if I wasn't clear. Covid jab day today and I was a bit distracted trying to plan for things in case I don't feel great. James

Can you respond with the information I asked for on 5th Jan? Sometimes these things just do take time. I get no assistance from Altair with this project, so unless I actually have the camera in question it can just be a case of waiting until someone happens to bring to light some critical piece of evidence that points to the cause. James

I'm at a loss to explain this for the moment, I have to admit. Do you know if it works ok with Kstars/Ekos? (Apologies if I've missed that information somewhere already.) James

According to the Sony datasheet for the ICX205 it looks to me as though it should be GBRG. You could always try imaging something during the day. That might help you recognise when the colours are correct. My experience is that two of the four possibilities look immediately obviously wrong whilst the other two may be harder to work out. James

Clearly you're unfamiliar with this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrosaurs#Synopsis James

I hadn't read that it had been attributed to a meteor, but I certainly heard it when I was out in the veggie plot this afternoon. I remember thinking "What on earth was that?!". But peace resumed and I think I must have assumed that it was something mechanical that had gone wrong with some farm machinery or something. James