Ugh… I hate uploading images to Lemmy. It seems to re-compress them and make everything look terrible :P Here’s the original image on my Google Photos site: https://photos.app.goo.gl/uvxGb7SgyGwHkxLH8

Oh, sure. The 2, 3 and Mini all use the same control app and have access to the “lab” for processing. That all happens online, not on the device. I’m not super crazy about using their tools, though, because I like having a little more control and knowledge about what is being done to produce the result.

I used the megastack feature to combine the two nights’ data. I post-processed the resulting FITS file with seti astro suite. I might go back and re-stack using siril to see if I can pull any more detail out, but I’m pretty happy already.

Actual sub-frames (pictures of the object you’re capturing) go into the lights folder. Dark frames are calibration shots, usually taken with the lens covered, once the telescope has reached operating temp, and used to subtract sensor-noise from the stack. I don’t know if Seestar offers a way to do those automatically. I actually don’t know anything about Seestar and what they provide, but flats and bias frames for my Dwarf Mini were provided from the factory, and there’s an option in the control app to capture dark frames.

If you don’t have any of those things, you can get a script that does the stacking without them. Go to the “Get Scripts” menu and look for the OSC_Preprocessing_WithoutDBF script (or something like that). There are other scripts available out there, too, many made by the community. You might be able to find one that’s dedicated to your telescope model. I suggest searching for people that have the same hardware as you and asking what they use.

https://siril.org/tutorials/first-steps/

Also keep in mind of you bought a scope and the camera and tracker and hooked it up to a laptop. It does the same thing.

Years ago, when I was first considering getting into astrophotography, I had an equatorial mount for my telescope and I tried steering it with Stellarium running on a laptop. Via a plug-in. And a bluetooth dongle connected to the mount. With a special driver that sent the serial commands over the bluetooth connection to the mount… It worked, but getting it set up and aligned took ages, and if any part of that chain glitched I had to start over. I never even got as far as adding a camera to the mix, LOL. These smart scopes have everything integrated into one self-contained package.

This is definitely making things more accessible for me. I guess I’m just curious how the grognards of the hobby react to these developments.

Your rebuttal is worse. We shouldn’t let cats wander outside for the same reasons we shouldn’t let zoo animals wander outside the zoo. They are not wild animals and they are not native to the environments we keep them in. It is bad for them and it is bad for the rest of the ecology. If someone thinks cats should be treated like wild animals they have no business keeping a cat in their home at all.

Long long caaaaaaaaaaaaat.

No, it isn’t. Domestic cats do not belong outside. The exposure to numerous hazards literally cuts their average life expectancy by half.

We have one of those. Gray cats are really difficult to photo well. Cameras always seem to mis-set the exposure.

Hey, I have an older version of the same case. Very solid choice.

Aw… we used to have a ginger tabby that would get up on my desk to get my attention while I was gaming. She sadly passed about 8 years ago. I still miss her.

Double-sided tape on the problem areas worked for our cats. But also make sure there are appropriate scratching posts available nearby.

Haha… our older cat will actually start crying at us when it gets close to bed time because she likes to sleep on the bed with us. Once we are safely in bed, she will crawl up and meow in my face until I pet her for 10-15 minutes, at which point she is usually satisfied and will go sleep at the foot of the bed. Sometimes she will curl up on my legs for a little while, but she never stays there.

Adorable. Reminds me of our cat, Ozzy. This was him a a little over a year ago, still a bit kittenish. He fell asleep in my lap while I was trimming his claws:

With that many cats, you’d really just have a black cat hole.

There are several options out there, and most of them don’t have a failure mode that could potentially harm your fur babies. They just stop working when something goes wrong. The one in the video has a design that is just inherently dangerous.

Just saw this video earlier today. Heartbreaking. I hope the online retailers respond and take action to get these things off the market. The design is just inherently dangerous.

What it’s made from is irrelevant. Plastic doesn’t break down in the gut and can cause dangerous blockages.

Same. We adopted a boy in August that is the most chill, patient, and friendly cat I’ve ever shared a house with. I mean, I’ve had friendly cats before, but they’re usually still pretty aloof. This boy just always wants to be where the people are, soaking up attention like a sponge. He is the stark opposite of his big sister, who will flee at the slightest unexpected noise or movement and has been known to claw and bite people who try to pet her without an explicit invitation.