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Click the preview above to see the timelapse!
This is a several hour long timelapse of the 2024 eclipse, made from all the photos I took on that day. These images was taken by a phone camera looking through an 80" finderscope with a solar filter on it. A raspberry pi pico connected to the phone and acted like a bluetooth mouse to “click” the shutter button and take photos.
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One day in the computer store I saw a 25 foot addressable LED strip on sale for $17. Less than $1/foot seemed like a good deal, I thought, and perhaps I could remove the LEDs and control them myself via an ESP32 microcontroller.
The model is the MLW7-1025-ICM smart LED strip. Interestingly, it isn’t visible on the manufacturer’s website but can still be found on Amazon or Walmart. Each addressable LED controls 3 physical LEDs that share the same color.
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(Zoom into these photos to see Mars!)
Taken using my Hadley 3D printed telescope, with a crowd of friends invited to watch the occultation of mars by the moon! The phone I was taking photos on ran out of battery, so I hastily threw a friend’s iphone into the holder just in time to capture these.
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I rediscovered the xkcd up goer five text editor, which lets you type using only the 1000 most common english words. So here’s my attempt at writing a description of something:
Not Real Numbers We know how to do many number problems. Number problems with adding are easy. Adding the same number over and over is also easy. If you take a number and add it many times, the same number of times as that number, you get a box number.
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@sylvie hi get fanarted for a fun game with neat movement mechanics
There’s something inherently funny about someone who only knows how to descend ladders by backflipping
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I saw the aurora! It looked like light pollution at first, and I only realized what it was when I noticed the underwhelming “clouds” were in a different place after ten seconds. An hour later they had slight tints of red and green and distinct ray-like shapes! Very cool. Phone camera picked up way more color and detail than I could see by eye, and long 8s exposures picked up even more.
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So I was talking to new local friends and telling them about telescopes and someone says “I have a mirror sitting on my table, is that something that could be useful?” and so after picking it up I now have a ginormous 12.25" mirror that’s 2.25" thick!!
…now what do I do with it? Honestly I’m tempted to make a scope out of it… but that would take money and I’d need to learn new skills like woodworking.
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I have a 1/2" diameter hole. I want to put a pipe inside the hole. What size PVC pipe fits into a 1/2" hole?
Did you guess 1/2" pipe? WRONG. “1/2 inch pipe” isn’t half an inch big on the outside. It’s closer to 7/8". You might think “ah so the 1/2” refers to the inner diameter". Wrong. The inner diameter of 1/2" PVC pipe is legally required to be 0.
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Today I learned liquids don’t exist in space. It’s either gas or solid because apparently liquids only exist when you have a ton of force squishing atoms together and forcing them to intersct and normally that’s air smashing into things at high speed. Crazy. Space whales won’t know what liquids are
Later that day… I found https://www.nasa.gov/ames/flute ! They want to use reflective liquids to make perfect parabola shapes for mirrors!
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This is the 1985 “electronotes builder’s guide and preferred circuits collection” and Bernie Hutchins is advising first time synth makers go buy chemicals at radioshack to etch copper and use a paintbrush to trace out wires manually. It’s so weirdly analog and hands-on compared to the way circuit boards are made today I’m used to, “pay someone else online to do it”