Interesting tool, would probably be super useful if I had more knowledge of the things floating around out there. I'm usually just concerned with photographing the galactic core on dark nights. I didn't have enough domain knowledge to figure that out with this tool though. I use PhotoPils on my iOS devices for astrophotography planning and that works great for my limited level of knowledge.
Don’t let lack of familiarity keep you from exploring. More and more tools/apps are available like TFA that lets you find things without knowing about them before hand. There’s no better way to learn than diving into the new to you object you just images all night. Don’t let some one tell you that you have to know an object intimately before imaging. How you progress through your journey in astronomy is up to you. Keep looking up!
The funny thing is that I personally have ended up creating a "large" google sheet with all the Messier objects which my rig could image, and added a column for "when" to image (i.e., spring, etc). It's served me quite well.
As I said in another comment, a true killer feature would be to image my yard, with all the obstacles blocking the sky, and intersecting the available sky space with the trajectories of those objects, and use that info to actually tell me what I can image.
You don't need to image your yard. That would be pretty overkill and would limit the use of the app from allowing its use if you took your gear to a new location.
Instead, you should just figure out what the degrees of the top of your blocking items are and set that as a limit. If the tops of trees mean something needs to be at least 30° above the horizon, then use that value. If your neighbor's house means it needs to be 60°, then use that value. Being allowed to say 30° to the east, 60° to the west, etc would be even better. Imaging your yard and having to decipher all of that would be way overkill and totally unnecessary.
Perhaps, but I value this simple explanation of the setup because it serves as a "these parts work well for this purpose" testimony. I'm already familiar with Manfrotto quality but not in this use type. It's nice to have my horizons broadened.
Data hoarders. I'm in a plex group on fb and there's people there with libraries that they could never personally watch all of. It sometimes seems like it's more a game of collecting all the things than it is about actually enjoying the collection.
You hear of media companies that delete old music and video from their own archives. People saving what they can may have the only copy left in existence.
Another part of it is the ability to play with enterprise hardware. That level of hardware has so many features which is cool for the technically inclined, but useless for a normal home user. When enthusiasm hits resources and the desire to acquire knowledge, this happens sometimes.
I have seen a couple of guys who acquired older generation storage "racks" which they "play with" in the weekends. Do they have the cooling? No. Does it affect their electricity bill? Very. But they want to learn that thing and want to play with it, which is understandable, as long as it's kept checked.
Not different from audiophiles who lose their way, actually.
I was a wannabe data-hoarder by accident, but I understood why I'm doing and decided to slim down drastically. I'm merging, deduplicating and deleting data step by step, because many of it is my own files from the days of yore, and I want to preserve some of them. To be frank, at this very moment I'm verifying that I have copied a bunch of files without corruption, so I can start working on them (sha256deep is an underappreciated tool).
Some of the datahoarders give me weird looks when I say, I'd rather have a single NUC with a couple of spinning drives for backing up what I care rather than having them all in a cabinet full of RAID arrays, but I already have them at work. I don't want another server at home (not because that I don't enjoy it, but I want to have some time touching actual grass).
Fwiw you don’t _need_ to leave the enterprise stuff on 24/7, or have a huge hdd capacity (vs say $n enterprise drives of very limited capacity). It’s still gonna be expensive, but not silly expensive (and the ROI when you get promoted probably makes it worth it)
> you don’t _need_ to leave the enterprise stuff on 24/7
If you are using enterprise SSDs the you need to be aware that the JDEC standards[1] are such that the assumption for enterprise SSDs is that they are operating 24/7.
Which is why, for example, the standards specify "power off data retention" of 3 months for enterprise SSDs vs 1 year for client SSDs.
And conversely, for reliability, the standards specify "active use" 24/7 for enterprise vs 8 hours/day for client SSDs.
Like many things with ID, the choice of client vs enterprise SSDs is a 'pick two' scenario.
In the post I have seen, where the guys got a single full rack and played with it on the weekends, running it for a day added a significant amount to their bills, so yes, newer systems are more efficient (generally due to compute efficiencies), but disks are disks. Spindles are not way more efficient than before.
On the ROI part, this is a case by case issue. I for one can do the "play" part at work, too. Also, I don't want to spare space for a 1U or 2U full-depth server at home. I'm not even adding disk boxes to this. I neither have the space, nor the desire.
Traditionally, hobbies cost money. I'm yet to hear anyone harangue folk on the ROI of their sourdough, blacksmithing or Storm Trooper cosplay hobbies. Perhaps this hobby is a little to close to sysadmin work for some, but I'm yet to see single-user SaaS weekend projects catch any flak on HN yet, instead, they are celebrated in "Ask HN: What are you working on" threads.
The point is the satisfaction you get in return of effort you put in, and perhaps kudos from like-minded folk when you execute particularly well.
Actually, I can reliably say that hobbies have some ROI, regardless of the hobby even, because you're getting experienced in what you do and subjects around your hobby. On the other hand if you do a hobby for its ROI, it's not a hobby anymore. It's just training. I prefer to have fun, not to train like a robot for some stats.
Recently I have watched a couple of Venus Theory's [0] videos. In one of them he asked the question why you're doing the thing you're doing, questioning the intention of creation. Is it self-satisfaction, or validation, he asks. I'm personally on the former camp. I used to share what I do for just putting it out, and adding a couple of pointers to it. If anyone commented on it, it's great (hint: nobody ever did). Otherwise I don't care. Having no feedback doesn't stop me, because I do what I do, enjoy the process and just put it out there (now less so because of the AI crawlers, alas).
While I like working/playing with computers, I have other hobbies, too, and I find them equally rewarding, and I don't care about their costs.
I also do not belittle the people who buy racks of hardware for their home. If I was not at the point I am currently, I'd probably do it, too. I'm just lucky to have access to it already, not needing these screeching hot banshees at home. Trying to scale down into a pragmatic minimalism also is both a result and reason of swimming in cables and big equipment in a small space when I was a teenager.
So, I got enough of these things at home, and I prefer to use them at their natural habitat. That's all.
A couple decades ago I came into posesion of some late model compaq servers, some fibre channel equipment, and a stack of small FC disks. Thanks to my MSDN sub I then had the necessary bits to build a proper MS server cluster. Thanks to that home lab I build the experience necessary to land a very good job and eventually ended up as a MS Server Clustering SME for a giant tech company doing work for one of the major CC companies. Home lab can be great because you can just break stuff on purpose to see how things work and what system resiliency looks like.
This is correct, I personally aim to have all the highest quality versions of all movies, ie original Blu-ray. I have plenty of people that make use of it, it’s a hobby.
> It sometimes seems like it's more a game of collecting all the things than it is about actually enjoying the collection.
Aren't all collecting hobbies like this? Stamps, music on vinyl, movie posters, retro computers, cars, etc all have very little additional utility for size > n.
If you run all the drives 24/7 I would guess you are looking at somewhere around 400W assuming a power sipping minipc as the host. This can be extremely optimized if you intelligently spin down disks when idle, probably down to >50W average.
Cost will depend on your electricity contract, but will propbably not be a thing that would stop you if you want to do this.
As far as serious hobbies go, 35% of monthly electric bill is not breaking the bank. How much do people with other hobbies spend monthly on parts for their project cars, race entry fees, gym fees, "high performance" gear, Track fees, etc?
If they were only arresting people not in the country illegally and doing it with constitutionally guaranteed due process then you may have a point. But they aren't. They are arresting, injuring, killing people who are exercising their constitutional rights. ICE has no shred of credibility left. They are not making things safer.
I personally know people in Minneapolis (where I live) who's constitutional rights have been trampled on by ICE. ICE is the enemy, all who support them have blood on their hands.
As someone who has built multi-camera live broadcast systems and operated them you are 100% correct. There is color correction, image processing, and all the related bits. Each of these units costs many times more and is far more capable with much higher quality (in the right hands) than what is included in even the most high end TV.
I speak from experience. I spend approximately twenty years developing technology for broadcast, motion picture, production and post-production. That also included systems integration, where we designed and built all kinds of facilities. The largest I was personally involved with had a $65M budget.
Most people have absolutely no idea what goes into making the pixels on their screens flicker with quality content.
Back 30 odd years ago I was doing work with a graduate/post graduate chem-e/material science group at the U of MN. I was working with a PhD candidate who was working on synthetic insulin. Part of the project was attempting to use a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to image insulin at the molecular level. I hadn't ever done work with STM before and part of showing proficiency with the tool was to image Highly Oriented Pyrolytic Graphite (HOPG) at the molecular level. As you can imagine almost any vibration will show up when you're working on the scale where you measure in angstroms.
To solve for the vibration issue the STM lab was in the basement of the building and the STM equipment sat on a multi-ton granite block that was suspended from the ceiling of the building. The building sits in the center of the U of MN campus right next to a major roadway so there were lots of opportunities for vibrations to enter into the structure.
One of the coolest feelings was the day that I successfully imaged HOPG at the molecular level. To point at the image on screen and be able to say "That's a carbon atom!" is insanely cool. I didn't end up staying in chem-e but the experience of working in a real research lab with highly intelligent and creative people has impacted my life in numerous ways.
> multi-ton granite block .. suspended from the ceiling of the building
That's fun to imagine. I've heard of vibration isolation for machines, using springs and such, but this is on a whole another scale. Sounds like the building must be designed for it specifically to withstand this kind of pull.
And to be able to take an image of an individual atom, what an experience.
Yeah I have no idea how they pulled off the structural piece. The building was built long before the technology was invented. It is a specialized building though. I was reading about its renovation/expansion in 2014. Apparently there are a couple 2 story labs to accommodate large distillation columns and there was additional vibration isolation work done because there's now a light rail train running right outside it.
Speaking of interesting building design, the chemistry building on the same campus was designed to channel any lab explosions upward. Apparently the roof will blow off but the building won't blow out and damage other buildings around it. Inside the building you die, outside you keep walking to class.
This reminds me of a story I heard about a bus driver who would always pull away from the stop right on schedule even if a regular rider was running up. His calculation was the 30 seconds spent waiting for one rider was an aggregate of many minutes lost by the riders who were on time for their stops. What looked cruel to one was a kindness to many.
A bus can easily carry 50 passengers. 30 seconds times that many is 25 minutes. That's a lot of aggregate time wasted indeed.
Also assuming this 30 seconds delay is not compensated later, it can influence significantly more people than the bus capacity. And if someone misses a connection because of it that's even more time wasted.
I had the same experience, loved my cardboard bricks. My kid never connected with them the same though even though my kid is big on building toys. Now they mostly just take up space, should probably give them away.
Screen devices can be a toy but it takes very intentional use of them.
My child has had an old iPhone se since 4yo. It has no network connection. I load music on it. It only has music, camera, and voice recorder apps. Like most toys it gets intense periods of play and then goes back in the toy box with a dead battery for weeks.
It's my assertion that the problem with tablets/phones as toys for kids is the endless stream of new content. It's addictive and never gets old. If you find a way to cut off the firehouse of new (and keep the addictive apps off) then they eventually become just another boring toy. Us adults could learn from this too.
I actually played mouse trap but my kid and their cousins do nothing with the game and love to just setup the trap. That game from the 80s has become a favorite toy of the gen alpha crowd when visiting the grandparents.
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