todays example of how screwed up health care is in this country

total bill for a minor procedure. $4800
amount insurance paid $600
my responsibility $0

so basically the actual cost was $600 but the hospital would have tried to screw an uninsured person for 8x that amount

M31 the andromeda galaxy

the original plan was to shoot it for a couple of hours and then move into m45 the pleaides star cluster but by 1am it hadnt risen above the trees so i stayed on m31 all night. (went to bed and let the camera keep clicking away )

a total of 7 hours of exposure

a good news story for a shitty day week and month

the boss has spoken

MTG has asked for privacy during her divorce

she has harassed shooting victims
shes harrased transgendered people.

karmas a bitch and shes about to meet it first hand

why i hate donating to political campaigns

i understand,it takes a huge amount of money. and i occasionally donate to a local candidate (like Beto). but once i do i start getting a huge amount of text messages from candidates across the country begging for money. I text back stop which stope that particular candidate but i still get more and more.

so far today ive gotten message from 3 states to donate. 5 different message. it really makes me want to stop donating.

tweet of teh afternoon

Jupiter

Jupiter is at opposition (directly opposite the sun ) and is also as close to earth as it will be in our lifetimes.
finally got an ok shot of it, planets are much tougher for me than deep space. they require extreme focal lengths and rather than taking a 100 or 200 shots and stacking them i shoot a short (1 minute or less) video,extract the individual frames and stack the best 20% or so.

this is the taken at an effective focal length of 4500mm
its a 1000mm telescope with a 3x barlow lens on a crop sensor camera.

the fed is destroying teh economy and handing congress to the GOP

mortgage rates are now 7%
stock are getting destroyed especially income paying stocks that a lot of retireees depend on. stocks are now at their lowest since december 2020

the fed waited to long to start raising rates and are now panicking on the other side and raising them so fast that its goign to cause a deep recession which will be nothing but good news for the GOP

the dollar is soaring on the feds aggressive hikes which is just compounding things. the dollar is trading almost 1-1 with the british pound and the euro is well under $1


meanwhile month over month inflation has dramatically come down. while the news likes to scream 8%+ inflation the rate for the last 2 months has actually been zero. for the last 3 months its been running at an annual rate of 5.6% down more than 50% from the 3 months before

evolution of an astrophoto

the processing evolution on an astrophoto. this is the fireworks galaxy ngc 6946 plus an open star cluster right by it


a single 3 minute exposure straight from the camera



5 hours worth of exposure plus calibration frames stacked




i use software called pixinsight for the heavy processing and stacking this is after the background has been neutralized in PI



after the background is removed the image is stretched to bring out the details while keeping teh background dark. you can really see the dust spots which is a side effect of stretching




cropped



final image after using photoshop do make teh background dark and remove dust spots. also used topaz photo ai for noise removal

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