Newcomer / Intro What are you up to?

I especially liked the light bulb moment in the above picture post.

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Spent the evening dodging another bullet around Sag A*,taking pictures,although they don't do justice to the experience of flying round it.Some very unusual effects, but even sitting watching it's
hard to get my head round what is being rendered in front of my
very eyes, and the awesome processes they represent.

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I was more cautious on my approach,this time.Flying with orbit lines off , i don't know if i hit an exclusion zone or the event horizon,but i was flying externally taking shots when i was yanked back to cockpit view with all bells and whistles .

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My PD took the brunt of it ,and after repairing the worst hit modules i scuttled off back to EA to turn in my codex discoveries.

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First: Congrats!!!

Secondly: Yes that is a special place and a very weird thing. Black holes are mindbendingly interesting. You are supposed to be able to survive passing through the event horizon of Sag A*, but not the smaller ones, due to spaghettification. You will still die shortly after passing the horizon, but like W. C. Fields said about drowning in gin, "O death, where is thy sting?".

Did you go all that way in a DBX?!? How do you fuel scoop without stopping and waiting at every star you jump to?
 
Some years ago, while doing astro photography, I got an idea about how to combine different images of the same object in the night sky into one image. This has a few interesting prospects. You can get a very high signal to noise ratio and since you average all the used images, you eliminate all the personal preferences people put into their particular version (one being too green is compensated by another being too red etc.). Last night, after having a ball at NGC 7822 in ED, I put together a quick version of the original nebula (combining ~100 different images), to see what it really looked like. The colors are not "natural", but this palette is often used, because it makes it easier to distinguish details in nebulae:

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The "core" of NGC 7822.

NGC 7822 is basically a giant cloud of gas pulling itself together due to gravity. This causes the gas to clump in certain spots, leading to "even more gravity", finally causing birth of new stars. It is one of many stellar nurseries in the night sky, but it has been popularized somewhat by ED:

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One of the most spectacular stellar nurseries is Messier 42 in the Orion constellation. You can see that with the naked eye even from a light polluted city, and it gets way better using a binocular in a dark place, but to really bring out the details, you have to take a picture with a VERY long exposure. I haven't calculated the total exposure time of this version, but it resembles keeping the shutter open for several years (this one is "natural" colors btw.):

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First: Congrats!!!

Secondly: Yes that is a special place and a very weird thing. Black holes are mindbendingly interesting. You are supposed to be able to survive passing through the event horizon of Sag A*, but not the smaller ones, due to spaghettification. You will still die shortly after passing the horizon, but like W. C. Fields said about drowning in gin, "O death, where is thy sting?".

Did you go all that way in a DBX?!? How do you fuel scoop without stopping and waiting at every star you jump to?
It's a pretty easy trip from Colonia, as much as any trip is safe.I thought it was much further than it seemed.As for the fuel scooping,i have never really understood the issue.But that just makes my glass half full.Under the old ADS system,maybe, but my refuel time is hardly ever wasted time and a system devoid of planetary bodies is a stepping stone to somewhere else.
 
It's a pretty easy trip from Colonia, as much as any trip is safe.I thought it was much further than it seemed.As for the fuel scooping,i have never really understood the issue.But that just makes my glass half full.Under the old ADS system,maybe, but my refuel time is hardly ever wasted time and a system devoid of planetary bodies is a stepping stone to somewhere else.
I admire your patience (y) I went from the Bubble to Sag A* in a Mamba, and that was a lot of jumps and a lot of fuel scooping. I prioritized the scoop higher than my FSD booster to be able to scoop while aligning the next star and charging the FSD as soon as it had cooled down. Didn't see a lot of planets on the way, and the way was still longer than swimming across the Atlantic Ocean ;)
 
Some years ago, while doing astro photography, I got an idea about how to combine different images of the same object in the night sky into one image. This has a few interesting prospects. You can get a very high signal to noise ratio and since you average all the used images, you eliminate all the personal preferences people put into their particular version (one being too green is compensated by another being too red etc.). Last night, after having a ball at NGC 7822 in ED, I put together a quick version of the original nebula (combining ~100 different images), to see what it really looked like. The colors are not "natural", but this palette is often used, because it makes it easier to distinguish details in nebulae:

View attachment 143821
The "core" of NGC 7822.

NGC 7822 is basically a giant cloud of gas pulling itself together due to gravity. This causes the gas to clump in certain spots, leading to "even more gravity", finally causing birth of new stars. It is one of many stellar nurseries in the night sky, but it has been popularized somewhat by ED:

View attachment 143827

One of the most spectacular stellar nurseries is Messier 42 in the Orion constellation. You can see that with the naked eye even from a light polluted city, and it gets way better using a binocular in a dark place, but to really bring out the details, you have to take a picture with a VERY long exposure. I haven't calculated the total exposure time of this version, but it resembles keeping the shutter open for several years (this one is "natural" colors btw.):

View attachment 143831
Beautiful, the exposure level in the trapezium core is excellent, hard to do. I tried for M42 on very still low water vapour nights on small telescopes.
But mainly chase comets now...Shall I share my blog...um, yeah why not.. http://cometal-comets.blogspot.com/
fun stuff over the years.
 
I've been out to the Gludge planetary nebula and the Skull and Crossbones nebula down in the Sanguineous Rim region and now I'm working my way back inward passing though a little panhandle of Achilles's Altar. I've never been in this region, does anybody know of anything interesting out here? Looking on the EDSM galactic mapping project there are a few POI around me but only one of them looks worth checking out. Pharos X10 looks promising for at least a neat screen shot.
 
Beautiful, the exposure level in the trapezium core is excellent, hard to do. I tried for M42 on very still low water vapour nights on small telescopes.
But mainly chase comets now...Shall I share my blog...um, yeah why not.. http://cometal-comets.blogspot.com/
fun stuff over the years.
Thanks for the link! (y)

As I mentioned, I developed a method for combining many other amateur astronemer's images into one some years ago. I was trying to image a large but very faint planetary nebula (Jones Emberson 1) from my balcony in the center of Copenhagen, and after gathering data for several weeks, I realized that it would be an impossible task because of all the light pollution. Instead I arranged a collaboration with other amateur astronomers and promised to combine all the data into one image:

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(Click for larger version)

While doing that I couldn't help thinking about the possibilities of very large scale collaborations, but organizing such would take too much time. Instead I had an idea. An image is just a dataset, and even with jpg compression, you still have a signal and some noise. Normally when enhancing the signal (gaining it) you also enhance the noise. To reduce noise you have to expose for a longer time, but even that has it's limits, because the signal to noise ratio doesn't scale linear with the exposure time. It's more like the square root of the increased exposure time. Most amateur astronomers start with M42 and the Andromeda Galaxy, because both are relatively "easy" targets. So I tried to gather as many jpg images of Andromeda Galaxy that I could find (literally thousands), and stacked them, as you normally stack separate exposures. It took me several months, but the result was worth it:


(very large image)

Since then I've refined the method (named "Crowd Imaging" by a fellow amateur astronomer). First I tried to develop my own software, but later I switched to PixInsight (the nerdiest software on this planet). I try to only use Creative Common licensed images, but gathering and keeping track of all the credits is a bigger task than making the image itself, so I'm only doing an image once in a while these days, and I don't publish them anymore. I still like the process, and while making an image you tend to learn a lot about the Universe, because you stumble upon strange details that you then start studying further.

Here is a link to a gallery of some of the images I made:


The method can also be used to create some very "deep" images, showing very faint and far objects. The furthest object I found had a redshift (Z) well above 2, making it close to the edge of the Visible Universe seen from Earth. Those images are also in the gallery.
 
Very cool stuff, guys. I have dabbled a bit with astronomy and astrophotography (modified webcam), but living in west London under the Heathrow flightpath makes for dismal viewing conditions. Hoping when LOML retires I can persuade her to move somewhere with relatively dark skies, but she does like life in the big city.
 
Living in or near a city, your options are mainly planets or narrow band imaging. Both are equally difficult to master. I went for narrow band, but it's an expensive hobby! Planet photography can also be very rewarding, and some of the results are astonishing. "Recently" when NASA discovered that the Red Spot on Jupiter was shrinking, they asked all the planet photographers to deliver their data, to backtrack the development. The thing is that there is only a very limited number of "Hubble Telescopes", so you don't use those for planets. Amateur astronomy is as nerdy a hobby as you want it to be. Some of the skilled people are some of the only amateur scientists whose work is used as "professional" science.

Some years ago I was invited to an evening in a dark place, where we watched a meteor shower (naked eye). There were several telescopes available and watching stuff like M51 from a dark place was a whole different experience. Btw. The best viewing experience I had that night, apart from the thousands of shooting stars, was a small cheap 6" reflector (SCT). I've never seen another telescope that well collimated (mirror alignment), and it was way better than large very expensive refractors. The guy who had that telescope was skilled! He had practiced for a long time.
 
Can someone explain the difference between honking a system and just letting the discovery scanner do it automatically?
As I understand it, the discovery scanner will automatically discover the stellar bodies in the system, and anything really close to the entry point (inside 60ls, maybe). But you have to honk to reveal all of the signal sources beyond that. In other words, if there's a gas giant out there at 3,000ls the passive scan will never reveal it.
 
Can someone explain the difference between honking a system and just letting the discovery scanner do it automatically?
I thought they were the same thing ("honking" being the nickname given to manually firing off your discovery scanner), but I might misunderstand what you're asking.
As I understand it, the discovery scanner will automatically discover the stellar bodies in the system, and anything really close to the entry point (inside 60ls, maybe). But you have to honk to reveal all of the signal sources beyond that. In other words, if there's a gas giant out there at 3,000ls the passive scan will never reveal it.

No, you have to fire the disco scanner to "discover" all stars if secondary ones are outside a passive detection distance - I don't know what that is for stars.

So out in the black, I arrive in a virgin system and my scanner is blank, after a short pause a star pops-up on there and I get the "Discovered Eenny-meeny-miny-mo" accompanied by a "system scan complete" message if there is nothing else to be discovered. I have to disco scan to get the "system scan complete" if there are other stars beyond passive range (and there are no other bodies).

The passive detection range for non-stellar bodies is about 30Ls I think.
 
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Grinding a little for cash and explorer rank today. Not much progress. On the upside, in RL, we ordered a new car. Happy days.

Anyway, I was wondering... what is the maximum SC speed one can achieve? I've got to just over 200c but I was wondering, on a trip to, say, Hutton, how many times c does one get up to? Perhaps I should just do it and see :D
 
Supercruising at those speeds causes massive wear on your hull. Check it next time you're at a station (adv. maint.). After scraping the paint of my Python by leaving it @ 2001 for some hours, there was 0% hull integrity left (I think that's what it's called). The ship was still flying fine (ofcurz, it's a Python!), but it might affect your survivability in a combat situation.

Edit: I just checked. It's called Ship Integrity in Advanced Maintenance. I haven't got a clue what it means, but 0% sounds like a potential problem :)

Edit edit: "So basically ship integrity is a hit point modifier that decreases the Y on the X out of Y (X/Y) on total hit points such as at 100% integrity and 50% hull you would be at 50/100 and at 0% integrity you would instead be at 50/70 assuming you were damaged before your integrity dropped and assuming you only had 100 hull hp to begin with."

 
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Grinding a little for cash and explorer rank today. Not much progress. On the upside, in RL, we ordered a new car. Happy days.

Anyway, I was wondering... what is the maximum SC speed one can achieve? I've got to just over 200c but I was wondering, on a trip to, say, Hutton, how many times c does one get up to? Perhaps I should just do it and see :D

I did Hutton run early for the money in a Cobra, got to just above 1800c.
No super cruise and full throttle all the way. Highest speed occurs when half way to anywhere.
Try not to get bored and do any barrel rolls as it loses speed. I thought that it would be a good speed run for a competition.
Where you could get a bobble Mug?
Did this to my cobra...
 
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