Happy New year, everyone! I wish you many clear nights to come. I’ve never really run a blog before, as I don’t fancy myself a writer or someone important enough to follow closely, so think of this as my ramblings into the void (haha) of what I’m doing and have been thinking about. I make no promises as to how useful or inspiring the following content will be, but I will set a few personal ground rules here: I won’t swear on this blog while I’m perfectly capable of doing so aloud, and I am not interested in having ads on this page for any reason. I prefer getting paid for providing real, tangible value to real, working people, not some abstraction in the form of a sales chart correlated with a view count.

Part I: I Hate Windows, So We’re Going Linux

On the issue of ads (and swearing), do you have any idea how terrible a piece of software has to be that it occupies the first part of my first ever blog post? The weather has been absolutely miserable lately, so I’ve been taking the time to optimize other aspects of my workflow. One major one is my PC, to which I’ve discovered to nobody’s surprise or misfortune that I absolutely despise working with Windows. Imagine being asked to spend over $100 for an operating system that both:

Shows ads to you in places that feel designed to frustrate and waste as much time as possible, and
Collects information about what you do on your machine that you paid for, and sells that to yet more advertisers.

Just to be clear, I don’t hate advertisements, at least not to the extent that I don’t want to see any of them. What I hate is the modern interpretation of advertising, which is as in-your-face as possible in the hopes that businesses get that sweet, sweet “mindshare.” I really wouldn’t even mind this as much if Microsoft were sensible and stopped asking for money for this miserable pile of circa-nineties spaghetti code and malware. I strongly believe in putting my money where my mouth is, so Windows needs to go. I had two sensible options.

Buy a Mac
Install a Linux distribution

Given that I just upgraded my PC with a 16-core processor that absolutely smokes, and wasn’t really in the mood to shell out a minimum of $700 for a brand new Apple-branded box, I chose the latter option. I already had some experience in running Linux as my daily system from my days in middle school, where I was running a Pentium III box that wasn’t supported by Vista (thankfully). CentOS was my OS of choice, since I already knew my way around GNOME, and I liked the yum package manager for its dependency resolution.

Redhat Annoyances, Let’s try Debian

That’s when I learned about Redhat’s latest move against the spirit of open source, and decided to try something a little less burdened by the needs of billion-dollar companies. I went to Debian, because I didn’t want Ubuntu’s company, Canonical, to make any similar moves. Debian is an excellent project, and if I were to recommend a distro to someone today, it’d probably be Debian. It’s stable, sensible, and not directly owned by profit-hungry shareholders. I also really enjoyed the ability to use NVIDIA CuDNN acceleration with Debian for the RC-Astro suite, although it’s not easy to set up. But it always felt clunky to use, and I really did want a more modern version of GNOME to use fractional scaling with my 4K screen.

Linux Mint caught my attention for a time, particularly its “Debian Edition.” I’d never seriously tried using the Cinnamon desktop on bare metal before, and I have to say, there was a lot to like. The return of a dedicated menu bar for everything really caught my attention, since I feel that 90% of the reason I open a terminal window is because an option isn’t exposed via a menu bar. I had LMDE 6 installed for a time, but I ran into some issues with my USB headphone DAC/Amp not being recognized at boot, making the boot/reboot process sluggish and annoying, but I did eventually have to stop because I had the same issues with fractional scaling (Cinnamon is still X11 by default). Perhaps expecting a distro to work without my tweaking it is a lot to ask, but I’d at least like the things I can fix to be something relatively simple and not something I have to do every day.

Why Fedora?

I had my misgivings with going to a project that remains heavily sponsored by Redhat. But I also had a set of specific requirements that really only left one option for me:

I didn’t want an immutable distro
I wanted vanilla GNOME, but I’d be open to other options
I definitely didn’t want snapd at all
I needed compatibility with Discord, Spotify (for now), Steam, my stupid Canon laser printer, and PixInsight (GLIBC > 2.35)
Fractional scaling support (not an experimental feature)
I wanted something that’s been around for a while, so I can be comfortable knowing that it’s not going to disappear in the next 5-7 years.

I can already hear people suggesting their own distributions of choice, and I’ll welcome them here with the understanding that I won’t be trying any of them outside of a VM unless they really impress me.

I had already switched over to a Radeon GPU (RX 480) that I had bought from my days in extreme overclocking (can you believe NVIDIA doesn’t work very well without a blob binary driver that breaks Wayland and therefore fractional scaling?), and I gotta say the setup was surprisingly painless. Discord, Steam, and Spotify all seemed to work with minimal effort, and I only needed to enter the terminal once to get PixInsight working:

localhost@localdomain:~$ sudo -i # for entering a root mode
root@localdomain:~# cd /opt/PixInsight/bin
root@localdomain:/opt/PixInsight/bin# mv unzip unzip-old
root@localdomain:/opt/PixInsight/bin# ln -s /usr/bin/unzip unzip
root@localdomain:/opt/PixInsight/bin# exit

Basically just needed to rename the version of unzip that came with the PixInsight installer, and insert a link to the one Fedora uses instead. Good luck doing a fix like that in Windows! Insert standard disclaimer here about copying someone else’s commands without understanding what you’re doing.

Part II: Knowing What You’re Doing Is a Skill

And I guess that really gets to the meat of the matter: knowing what you’re doing is a learned skill, not an inherent talent. Being quick to learn is a talent, but I strongly believe that the most skilled people for a certain task are the ones who practice it often. This comes with a catch, however: you need to be willing to fail. I don’t mean that you need to accept failure, rather understand that failure is inevitable. If you want to live in a world where nothing breaks or goes wrong, I’m sure there are a myriad of happy salespeople who are willing to part you with your money and time in the effort to meet that goal. But I’m not one who has either infinite money nor infinite time, so I’ll make do by trying things and breaking them.

Speaking of breaking things, I guess now is as good as any a time to take stock of what I’ve managed to acquire over the past year. Those who know me well enough understand that when I acquire something, it’s usually heavily used and not in working condition. This year was actually quite a haul for me:

Meade DSI IV Mono

This is a cooled monochrome camera I picked up for $400 on CloudyNights’ classifieds page. It’s a 4/3rds sized 16MP monochrome camera using the Panasonic MN34230 sensor, found also in the ASI1600-series cameras. That price is insanely attractive, and I picked it up because the seller was unable to get it to connect to his Stellarmate setup, which didn’t come with a usable driver for the Meade variants of Touptek cameras. Ah-ha! A software issue, I have a reasonable shot at getting this thing to work.

The Meade DSI IV

This came out in 2018, and was discontinued rather quickly for nonspecific reasons. The Meade ASCOM drivers were infamously buggy, so it’s unsurprising that this camera didn’t sell particularly well compared to its ZWO cousin, the ASI1600MM
Here it’s pictured on the back of my wide-field rig

I first verified the seller’s claim, which was true. The Meade Touptek driver is indeed missing from the version of KStars/INDI that’s included in the astroberry repositories (which is where all the raspberry pi systems pull their builds from). So I took a peek at the INDI-3rdparty github page, and apparently a recent version had a new driver for Meade cameras. Excellent! All I had to do was….

Build the source code for INDI, the INDI-3rdparty libraries and drivers, stellarsolver, and finally KStars. There was probably an easier way to do all this, but I found a way that worked and all it cost me was time. I had already migrated my telescopes over to using KStars for image acquisition with Raspberry Pi computers, but I’ll probably just document the architecture and process in a separate post another time. Long story short, it’s a lot of “git clone,” “make,” and “make install” commands.

Once all that was working, it connected flawlessly to KStars. Success! Now for the fun part of figuring out the quirks of the camera itself. I had learned from my modded Rebel XSi that you can’t just leave things at defaults and shoot away with all cameras, and it quickly became apparent here that shooting the DSI camera with a gain of 100 and an offset of 0 with narrowband filters was not going to fly. The dark regions of the image got truncated to black, or a brightness of 0, which is unusable for stretching. So after multiple weeks of trial and error, a SharpCap sensor analysis (shown below), and watching this lovely lecture from Dr. Robin Glover, I came away with a pair of settings profiles and sub-exposure times for my telescope in my light pollution area.

A SharpCap sensor analysis run on the DSI IV mono camera

The sensor analysis shows that this camera is fine, but not amazing. It’s only 12-bit, and has amp glow that looks extremely ugly, although it seems to calibrate out mostly. It’s basically identical to my Orion G16 I picked up the year before, without the color mottling issues. All-in-all, amazing value for half the price of a decent new camera.

iOptron CEM60

My dream telescope mount is a Losmandy G11. It’s the only piece of equipment I ever have the intention of buying brand-new from Scott, because I think it’s worth it to support American manufacturing, and Scott won’t see a dime of it if I buy it used. Until such a time that I can explain to my other half why I felt compelled to spend four grand on a hobby, I’ll take a look at the used market for alternatives.

And by golly I think I scored. A lovely gentleman over on the NebulaPhotos Patreon Discord server had a CEM60 to sell, as it had horrendous guiding issues, and was asking for $800 shipped. After looking at the guide logs and evaluating my own experience in mount tinkering, I figured sure, why not? About a week later, as he was getting the mount ready to ship, the seller noticed that there was a screw that had fallen out. He informed me of this, and decided to honor the terms of the sale anyway. It arrived a week after that, and when I got it set up, it slewed around without a care in the world. There’s just one problem with this mount: it’s heavy. Like dozens of pounds heavy. Months and some significant saving later, I picked up the corresponding tri-pier for the mount head, and I have a feeling that wherever I set this absolute behemoth up, I’m not going to want to move it around like I already do with my HEQ5.

The iOptron CEM60

This mount was released over 10 years ago, and still packs a punch if you can get a working one. It’s heavy, and can carry 60 lbs of gear. This is ideal for large, heavy telescopes or for side-by-side systems

Unfortunately, because of its weight and bulk, I haven’t had a chance to really use it under the stars. I can’t image from home as I live in the city and the trees and buildings give me no room to see the sky. I’m in discussions with some people in Dagsboro and Wilmington to see where it can stay for imaging, but for now it’s shamefully boxed up in my basement, waiting for the day it can come out and play. I do plan to move relatively soon, and one of my key considerations is access to the sky. You can expect a follow-up once I have an idea of how this thing does in the field.

Orion 8” f/4 Newtonian

This may come as a surprise to some, but up to this point I had never used a Newtonian telescope before in my life. I knew they were an option, and they’re still king of value when it comes to aperture, but I just hadn’t had a need for one since I had a small refractor for wide-field imaging, and an SCT for deep-field. But after a while of everything working the way it should, I got the classic itch of wanting to work on something new. So I went window shopping on CloudyNights again and found an 8” newt with an included coma corrector for $500.

The 8” newt on my HEQ5, imaging M33. I hadn’t quite figured out cable management at this point.

It’s certainly a scope. I wasn’t new to collimation, as I needed to collimate my SCT a few times, but I was new to collimating both mirrors. I picked up a Cheshire eyepiece, and that’s when things got interesting. Following the guide available on High Point Scientific, I was reasonably certain everything was aligned properly, but a field star-test showed me otherwise. Strangely, my out of focus stars looked eye-shaped even when centered, so I suspect I’ll also need to look into a laser collimating tool. But I did manage to get an image of M33 with those beautiful diffraction spikes

M33 - The Triangulum Galaxy

I still have work to do with my galaxy processing, but I’m definitely enjoying the Newtonian field of view

It’s clear I have a lot to learn with this scope, and I’ll put a gentle plug here for Delaware Astronomical Society (DAS) for providing me with an extremely well-learned community of people who know what they’re doing. I don’t recommend the approach of buying used and broken and fixing things later, but if that’s the way you want to go, it’s never a bad thing to just talk to someone.

Part III: Patience

This was a particularly challenging year for me to take images in. Most of my issues were in finding the time to do so while also balancing:

Graduating from college
Beginning my first full-time engineering job
Getting engaged
A functional social life

But the neat thing with astronomy is that the stars are always there, and nothing you buy really expires. I have enough things to work on to keep me busy for a time, and there’s always something new to learn. At some point I’d like to try planetary imaging again, and even try my hand at lucky imaging. There’s a region of M33 that I’m interested in getting a close up view of that’s both tiny and bright, so that would seem an ideal candidate once M33 is out again. I’m at the mid-point of the Orion season, and I don’t have any immediate plans to get out and image since the weather is so cold/awful, but once that’s back to reasonable it’ll probably be time for galaxy season.

IC132 looks really interesting to me, and I’d love to use my guide camera with my big SCT to get a close up view of it

I’m not sure how good it’ll be with the horrible seeing in my area, but I think it’d be worth a shot once M33 is back up in the sky next summer

This post is getting pretty long, so I’ll leave you with this. No man is an island, and learning is a life skill. Don’t be afraid to break your things with the intent to see how they work. If you want to play it safe, save up enough to pick up something as a project instead of a necessity. I wouldn’t want anyone getting the impression that a project car is the same as a daily commuter car, it’s not. But you learn a whole lot more by doing than by reading.

Clear skies, and see you next time.

Happy New Year, How Are Things Going?