| 1 min
| 137 words
This is the best photo I’ve made of the Andromeda galaxy!
It’s my second time stacking pictures to bring out faint details. You’re looking at 20 phone pics taken through my 3D printed telescope, each 1/2s exposure so the Earth didn’t rotate as much during the photo and smear the stars. I tried the program deepskystacker, but it failed to stack my pictures (maybe my phone camera’s pics had too much noise?
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| 1 min
| 59 words
BEHOLD, MY FIRST STACKED ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY IMAGE!
This combines 20 1/2sec exposures taken with my phone through my 3D printed 4.5" telescope. You can see stars down to magnitude 12!! This is so cool.
Turns out I didn’t see a galaxy in my photos because… I was looking at photos of a non-galaxy. This is the ring nebula, M57. Oops.
| 1 min
| 45 words
I took many 1/2s exposures of the galaxy M33 but it wasn’t visible. I’m trying to combine them in python to see if together it can simulate a long exposure. It’s not going too well
(The lines are from stars moving as the earth rotates!)
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| 48 words
There’s a galaxy (named M33) in most of this picture
but it’s so faint I couldn’t see it by eye or by camera :(
The pifinder helped me find this place, so I took like 30 exposures in the hopes that I can stack them and see it
| 2 min
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Oops. NOW my Sliced PiFinder is done.
The original PiFinder uses a $50 USB GPS module. To avoid spending $50, I wrote some code to fake a GPS. Eventually the dev brickbots switched PiFinders to a $10 solderable GPS module that uses UART instead of USB, and $10 felt reasonable, so I bought one and soldered it in. I thought I was done and that all I had to do was edit the software to remove my fake GPS code and use the regular GPS code!
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| 2 min
| 265 words
I’m building the Sliced PiFinder, a device to help my telescope find things! Previously, I tried using a cheaper IMU but gave up and bought a $30 fancy chip.
Originally I didn’t want to buy a $50 GPS USB stick but the PiFinder creator found a $10 solderable GPS unit for a v2, so I bought one and soldered it in.
After soldering in the GPS chip, dubiously electrical taping it in place, dropping it and cracking my 3D printed parts, printing new parts, using a soldering iron to remove heat inserts out of the old parts so I can place them into the new parts, printing the case, discovering the case wasn’t designed for my battery and blocks access to the on/off switch and USB ports, melting holes in case with soldering iron, putting on a cover plate over the screen and LEDs… I finally put it on my telescope!
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| 1 min
| 40 words
Perseus double cluster
Equipment used: my 3D printed 4.5" telescope, custom mount, Pico pic-taker button, my phone
I have a raw version of this where some stars are noticeably blue or orange but it has more camera noise than this
| 10 min
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I’m building a PiFinder! It uses a camera to take pictures of the sky, connected to a raspberry pi which uses a database of stars to tell you where in the sky your telescope is pointing. But a PiFinder is $550 new. A stock pifinder uses the newest and most expensive options for pis and cameras, and when I looked at the parts list, I thought: I can build something similar for a fifth of the price!
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| 2 min
| 357 words
The pifinder is a tool to help you aim a telescope. It uses a camera to take pictures of the sky, connected to a raspberry pi which uses a database of stars to tell you where in the sky your telescope is pointing. Then, if you want to find a specific object, it tells you what direction to move your telescope in.
I’m building a janky pifinder with some nonstandard parts: instead of a $60 raspi 4 and $50 HQ camera and $25 lens and $30 IMU, I’m using a $10 lens, a secondhand raspi 3, and a cheap “pi camera module v1” from 2013 that was attached to the raspi, and a $20 IMU with unpronounceable name I found lying around in a drawer of sensors.
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| 54 words
The scoring tool cut a circle fine, but then the next step was supposed to be “press it from the rear side and the crack will deepen”, and it just… Didn’t. Maybe this glass is just too thick? I still have half my countertop left, I need a new way to cut 1/2" glass