ONIKKINEN

Magnification when using a camera is difficult (or rather not possible) to determine. With an eyepiece the magnification you see is defined by how much larger the objects looks than with your naked eye, but when viewing an image taken with a camera the size can change depending on what device is used to look at it. For example lets look at the image on a smartphone screen at arms length, and next lets look at the same image on a 27'' display at arms length, surely the bigger screen image has higher magnification as the image is several times larger? As you can see it gets tricky right away, which is why the term magnification is typically not used for imaging purposes. You can approximate the effect of magnification somewhat by using the field of view you get from the camera/scope combo and comparing that to a view with a certain eyepiece. It does not equate to a magnification, but at least you now have something to compare against. Handy tool for figuring out what your scope/camera combo can fit in a single image: https://astronomy.tools/calculators/field_of_view/

I apologize for the abrasive tone. I also apologize for the continuation of the abrasive tone for what comes next. Monitoring objects in orbit is significantly easier than monitoring the empty quarters of our planet. Objects in motion stay in motion (something something Sir Isaac Newton), which means an object in orbit will stay in orbit unless acted upon by an outside force. We can predict stable orbits very easily to quite far in the future. Of course there is variation in atmospheric drag due to many things (like solar flares that can expand the upper atmosphere and cause more drag, one of the things that makes calculating a re-entering crafts/piece of spacejunks exact moment of re-entry difficult). Satellites typically do not have high thrust to weight ratio propulsion systems on board, and so any orbital change is very slow and can be noticed within a few orbits of the maneuver beginning. In the case of ion propulsion the maneuvers themselves can take days or weeks. So yes, i am saying that tracking satellites is significantly easier than tracking planes, especially if those planes deliberately take the easily toggleable trackers offline (in the case of a deliberate incident, which MH370 may or may not have been, we might never know). Yes, it would be implausible. Partially because it is implausible that there are nearby advanced civilizations. It is more likely that i win the lottery 5 times in a row with the same numbers. Actually even this is not a fair comparison because we know for a fact that the lottery exists and its not impossible to win it 5 times in a row, whereas we do not know of any nearby civilizations even with decades of searching. If there was a civilization with their own radio bubble within say 10 light years from us, we would definitely know of it. Stars further than this might as well be in Narnia. But i should believe in aliens on Earth when there is 0 evidence for this? And that could be done with a blinkered view? Really i wish to know how is is that one comes to the conclusion that any unexplained thing is because of aliens. An unidentified aerial phenomena is just that, unidentified. Its not identified as aliens aerial phenomena until we have evidence. Scientific papers, peer reviews, material evidence, laboratory studies. If all that happens, then maybe it is reasonable to suggest non-terrestial involvement (if the studies support this), but until then it is the least likely scenario. Also, it is not clear there really even is an unknown thing that the whole hearing discussed since no evidence was shown. So at this point it was entirely hearsay. This is not an example of misinformation. This is an example of being wrong, and then taking back those words once we learned we were wrong (while the automotive industry tries to slow down change of course). Diesel engines are significantly more energy efficient than petrol engines, but produce particulates (amongst other things) in their exhaust which are very difficult to filter out and will cause health issues when breathing these in. This was not always known, or if it was, it was not cared for because priorities change over time. Today diesel engines are being phased out because we learned more, this is how science progresses. So there really is no lie here in my opinion. I still dont quite understand what your point was although i spent some time reading through your comment(s) again. Do you think there is some evil entity manipulating the average person to not think of aliens or something?

Well, if this is the attitude then i cant be certain of anything at all. Everything i learned in school was taught to me by someone who supposedly knew what they were talking about, but since we cant accept that it must have been false and i actually learned nothing. Therefore the only real things in the world are a sunset and a sunrise since they are guaranteed and i can observe them firsthand. Although having been to Lapland in summer i can also say that sunsets are objectively false since they did not happen during that time so it must also be a lie. See the problem with saying that nothing can be trusted? Obviously you have to know your sources, and for governmental and non-governmental space (of many nations) organizations there should be an assumption of trust when it comes to these things. Satellite tracking is one of those things that is easier to just do than fake to do (kind of like the Moon landing was easier than faking it). Assuming you mean MH370 that disappeared and was never seen again? While it is not known what happened, there are plausible explanations. If it flew until engines flamed out (for whatever reason) it will have crashed into the ocean over such a large potential area that it is virtually impossible to find even soon after it happened. We have a much better view of objects in low earth orbit than we do of our oceans because frankly there is no need to survey our oceans at all times. If you have already decided that everything is a conspiracy and its all aliens, then there is probably nothing that can sway that opinion.

All known orbiting objects large enough to be tracked, are being tracked basically at all times. At least in a way that if one changes orbit it will be known very quickly because its actually dangerous if some piece of spacejunk or just a functioning satellite suddenly changes orbit and causes a collision hazard to other orbiting satellites. If you follow space news of some kind you will occasionally hear of a satellite that either changes orbit rapidly, or by a large amount. These are usually not disclosed, but can be often traced back to launches of an undisclosed military payload where we can assume it is a test of some new method of propulsion. Not new as in some star wars tech, but new as in maybe 5% more efficient type of ion engine or similar that is not typically interesting to people outside astronomy as a hobby.

The YouTube video nonsense part is easily answered: The more outrageous and aggravating a thumbnail and video title you can make the more you get clicks. And with that you get views which in turn will generate ad revenue which adds up to a significant source of income if you manage to get a few hundred thousand views. So the answer is, like it often is, that someone is making money off of all the nonsense. And the way the YouTube algorithm works to promote content and suggest it to more viewers is based on engagement which encompasses views, comments and likes (or dislikes. It does not matter if the video is disliked because clicking that button is engagement and good enough for the algorithm). Also a negative comment means nothing, its just more fuel to the fire. The best thing you can do is click the 3 dots and select "dont recommend channel" or "not interested" which will make the algorithm try and not suggest content exactly like that in the future. The more you use YouTube and the more you do the "not interested" thing the better it gets. After some time the bad videos no longer appear on your recommendations.

Well, that might be a California thing, but here where the average imaging temperature is well below 0 an unregulated power supply (of any type) will simply be trouble waiting to happen.

Yep, you should never use a "dumb" unregulated 12V power supply as a primary power source for astro kit. I have had 2 small ones like this, (a Celestron 84wh one and a car jump pack) and both become unusable after just a few minutes of load. For travelling astrophotographers a proper power station like a jackery or similar is a must have in my opinion.

It looks like the Gaia name ID is based on the RA coordinates, both numbers are very similar at least. Makes sense to catalogue the stars with the coordinates in the name and not give each new object its own arbitrary catalogue number.

What does the .txt file look like? Mine looks like below with Gaia DR2 annotation: You could search with the coordinates instead of the SourceID (if that is what you pasted). But i think there is no mistake and a page for the star you searched simply does not exist. I dont think all of the catalogue is uploaded to vizier or simbad because there is just so much to upload and 99.9% of the objects are just another star.

I suppose if we could not understand anything of the technology then it could be interpreted as non terrestial. Although it could still be a clandestine military gizmo that no-one dares admit they have misplaced. If it were made of material not currently found in our periodic table, then maybe a possible explanation could be a non-terrestial origin. But if we could reverse engineer that material and synthesize it with relative ease, then its also possible that someone simply initially engineered that on Earth. Or the electronics found would be manufactured at such a small scale that no fab on earth could possibly make it today. Although here again there could be a secret fab for military tech that is not disclosed to the public. I guess it would have to be made of "new physics" that none of our theories at the moment can explain. Some kind of quark-quantumfield-rotary-thingimajig made of little-greenmanium with integrated circuits at atomic scale. Would have to be truly without explanation to be considered non-terrestrial IMO.

I wouldnt believe its aliens even if there was such evidence. Its not aliens until every other possible or impropable explanation has been ruled out. And how can one tell if something is alien technology or non terrestial life? The life part might be explainable easily if its not similar to Earth life at all, but that takes some actual lab work to prove (and not an eyewitness). The tech part is almost non proveable. Militaries all over the world are developing technologies that will not be known publicly for decades, so most likely an unknown piece of tech is of that source.

Maybe, but time is a harsh mistress. Almost all of ancient history is lost to us forever so there may well have been a thousand tapestries circulating for hundreds of years only to be lost in the sack of Constantinople (like a major portion of all known history). Just to be clear my stance on this whole thing is that someone has something to gain from this theater (which is obviously not a revelation that aliens are among us or some other mumbo jumbo). Probably a similar thing as the flat earth movement where gullible people are purposefully lead astray to make money off them. The whole hearing (what little clips i went through) sounds like a typical stiff political hearing where almost nothing actually gets said but with a lot of words.

Back in those days any mysterious unexplained phenomena will have likely been called an act of a deity. The Romans and the Greeks associated many at the time unknown natural occurrences with acts of the gods (like volcanoes, earthquakes). Today we have scientific explanations for these, but to an ancient person it may have as well been magic.

Beautiful image! Nice, crisp and clean processing too.

Is the dropout between the client and the server, or does the mini-PC actually stop broadcasting its hotspot through the mini-router causing a dropout? My mini-router (same as yours, i think) has terrible range and will drop or freeze the connection occasionally but will reconnect back. Simply having the scope between my tablet and the minirouter can cause a freeze. Or a closed car door, or more than 5m with perfect line of sight. These are non issues for me since the mini-pc will keep capturing regardless of connection so have not looked for a solution. * Just thought of something else, when you are testing this you do have your home wifi turned completely off? Your mini-pc may be trying to connect to your home wifi because the minirouter connection has no internet connection and so windows in its infinite wisdom will keep looking for a better connection.

YouTubers begging for money is a necessary evil in my opinion, it provides the means for a high production quality channel to exist. All the hobby youtubers will transition to a full time employment youtuber if given the chance to make their living out of it. Its annoying and i think there is an issue of bias when it comes to product reviews but hey at least all the content is free so there is that.

Focal ratio does have an advantage here, because you take fewer panels to reach a certain FOV. Comparing my f/5 200mm aperture scope with a RASA for example will have a clear winner in terms of speed (the RASA). If both are f/5 then the theory would say that the larger aperture will win. I think in practice there are some "losses" in efficiency with mosaicing, namely having to account for panel overlap which will eat some of the speed up. There are also some considerations with how to image the panels, in one go or several nights which will surely affect the total speed of the project when the single panel scope can just image whenever. So i think this is one of these "in theory faster" type situations, where its not so simple in the end. Would love to see a comparison if someone were able to image a target with 2 different scopes on the same night, something like a small f/5 refractor and a typical newtonian and see which gets the better image.

Since the topic has taken a turn towards the question on how long is enough for a single panel i will shamelessly plug one of my own images here: This is a 4 panel mosaic of which 2 are 9 minutes and 2 are 10 minutes. So hows that for speed? Captured at f/5, but binned to an absurd level and the result is that just 9 minutes is enough for what i think is an ok image.

I have done only a handful of 4 (and some 2) panel mosaics, but always tried to capture data for all the panels on the same night. That makes the mosaicing part significantly less painful since all the panels were imaged under more or less the same conditions so you will have fewer issues with visible seams between the panels. So i would take a 4 panel mosaic by repeating each panel at some short interval, like 30 minutes per panel and onto the next one. That guarantees that you get a similar amount of data for each panel. With more panels i think there will inevitably be an issue of different imaging conditions per panels, so i might not try to get all on the same night. Planning an 8 panel M31 and a 12 panel veil which will have to be chopped up for sure (not sure if either will actually go through). PixInsight's photometric mosaic script is pretty damn good though so I'm sure it will be fine in the end.

Doesn't look right to me, at least doesn't look like any other IMX533/571 dark frame i have ever seen. There is the speck of amp glow yes, but i would be more worried about the horizontal banding that seems to run across the entire frame. Very unusual looking darkframe for sure.

Clipping when stacking doesn't remove all the different diffraction spikes if all the datasets have a significant portion in the total integration (or it would have to be turned to such an extreme that actual signal gets destroyed too). If there were 5 refractors and one reflector, then maybe since the reflector is an outlier. Normalisation, and weighting of the subs in general is the most important thing in a stack where data quality is greatly variable.

You can! Simple processing of the image will yield a result that is a mix of all the diffraction spikes so in most cases a mess of different spikes because there are many ways you can orient your tube and your spider vanes (like below, a dozen scopes mixed). Alternatively you can do some selective processing by taking bright stars from only one dataset (either with or without diffraction spikes), or some star synthesis voodoo to create diffraction spikeless stars from the input data (not sure how, i just know it can be done).

Try these drivers: https://ftdichip.com/drivers/vcp-drivers/ These are for Pegasus astro (blue cable) and Lynx astro (black cable) serial to USB cables. I think these 2 might be the most common cables sold, although there are many others. NINA should show this option if the mount is found: Doesn't matter if your mount is an HEQ5/6, all EQMOD mounts will show up as that.

You still need the EQMOD software installed for NINA to be able to use your mount with it. You'll need the "EQASCOM" software from here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/eq-mod/files/ You may also need to install the driver for your specific EQDIR cable, and which driver it is depends on your cable. There should be a mention on the page you bought it from on what driver to install or a leaflet that came with it (probably a prolific driver).

What method of connection are you using? If a USB port, you need the relevant Skywatcher drivers installed, if an EQMOD cable through the handcontroller port, you need EQMOD installed. I suspect you also need to install something for the QHY camera for it to show up.