LaydeeDem

Thissa meeeee

Off the top of my head: -Purchase and renovate dead or dying malls across the US and turn them into rent-free public housing. -Donate heavily to charities for at-risk LGBTQ+ youth, or start my own. -Donate to underfunded projects like SETI -Sustainable farming projects, especially in places affected by climate change -Use the rest to set up a small arcade with my girlfriend. I think it's important that alcohol-free social spaces exist, especially for LGBTQ+ people, who only really have gay bars. Plus arcades are awesome. Idk what else. The last thing I'd want to do is hoard it though. A trillion dollars is a society changing amount of wealth.

Downloaded the Kerbalism mod, started a new save, and took Bill, Bob and Val on a week long stay on the Mun. (We could have gone longer but I didn't anticipate just how hungry Kerbals were.) Before I did that I landed a hab to ensure the Kerbals were cozy during their stay. Then I sent up the MEM and CSM with two seperate launches using an SLS lookalike. (The Hab was sent up on one too, but it was a night launch so I didn't take any screenshots. After that I docked up the two craft in LKO and sent them towards the Mun. I didn't bother avoiding the radiation belts during the transfer. Probably should have. After Munar capture I undocked the MEM and proceeded to do my most hair-raising landing in a while. The sun hadn't risen at the landing site yet which led to a lot of !!FUN!! during landing. But alas! Insanity prevailed and the three kerbals made it safely to the surface. Getting the rover down was a bit of an adventure in itself. The KAS winch didn't help and Bill had to flip the rover manually while Val and Bob took their seats. (Also a Munar eclipse happened!) Once the rover was down, Bill, Bob and Val were free to take the rover for a joyride. First stopping at the Hab for a 1 hour break and EVA fuel, and then beginning the first trek of the mission, a survey of the nearby crater. Using advanced survey techniques, the gang was able to determine that this crater was about 3.6 km in diameter! After a careful drive back to the Hab, the crew climbed back in for a well deserved rest and snacks. There's 5 days left of food onboard, plenty of time for the exploration of the local area.

Imgur was acting up last night so I used the compression-free service cubeupload. I'll swap out the links later today and see if that helps. In the meantime try the Flickr link?

Made a mosaic of the Ecliptic using the most Kerbal equatorial platform ever. 6 solar system bodies (including the Earth) are visible in this wide view. From left to right: Mars, Saturn, asteroid Vesta, Jupiter, Venus and the Earth. Pluto is also in the field, though it is too dim to show up in the image. Taken at around 13:53 UTC on August 30th, 2018 Please view the fullres! Flickr Astrobin Jeb approved™ equatorial platform:

Devised and carried out an overly-complicated Munar probe mission involving a ballistic capture and a payload return. Only needed about 34 m/s of dV for the circularization burn. Be jealous. Of course once science was done it was time to bring all that juicy data back to Kerbin. Mama needs her 2.5 meter parts! So I ejected from the Mun and set up an aerobraking maneuver at Kerbin. It was around the firs aerobraking pass that I realized I forgot the parachute. Shoot. There ended up no being enough dV left for a suicide burn, so I decided to abort the original plan and just transmit the science instead. It was still a juicy amount, but only a fraction of what I would have gotten if I had recovered it. After that I built a cute little survey jet and then crashed it in Kerbin's southern hemisphere. Poor Mirick had to walk to the survey sites.

Reprocessed my Rho Ophiuchi from a few months back. Better crop + I found a photoshop plugin to remove the green cast: The original: And this not really photography related but on another note I managed to sight Uranus with my naked eye using averted vision while out watching the Perseid meteor shower with my girlfriend. No meteor pictures unfortunately but it was a memorable night regardless. :)

Spent hours trying to get this thing into orbit to no success, remembered why I don't build spaceplanes: I'm always about 200-300 m/s short on dV by the time I reach space. At least it looks pretty:

Does the mesosphere count as space? Last night I got my very first image of a red sprite! Sprites are very faint and not much is known about them, so I'm really happy to have gotten one on my first try. I'm almost tempted to do a full spectrum mod on my DSLR to go sprite hunting but it's my only camera right now and I use it for daytime photography too so a full speccy mod is out of the question atm. Canon EOS 350D Canon EF-S 18-55mm lens 35mm focal length, cropped 2x ISO 1600 f/4.5 30" exposure To try and keep this post on subject, here's also an image of M31 I got two weeks ago. I was very happy to be able capture the disk of the galaxy even without any sort of star tracking. Canon EOS 350D Canon EF-S 18-55mm lens 35mm focal length f/4.5 20x15" lights 4m 43s total integration time No darks, flats, bias

Built a commsat network and then I dropped an A-class hot potato into Munar orbit. The ion probe still has about 60% of its fuel left even after redirecting the asteroid. Tempted to send her out to Dres or Jool after this.

Wide-field view of the space around Cygnus. Annotated Vers: Canon EOS 350D Canon EF-S 18-55mm kit lens 35mm focal length f/4.5 9x30" lights (4.5 minutes integration) No darks, flats, bias

Hey all! It's been a hectic couple of months since I Iast posted. I'm back though, and I thought I'd share some images I've taken/processed during that time. I don't have an equatorial mount, so expect some noise and streaking on my images. I'm mostly just happy with how much I can capture w/o a mount. Even though it's definitely on my wishlist haha. Anyways without further ado: To start off I took this image of the Hubble Space Telescope passing near Mars and Saturn and occulting a star back in April. (April 18, 2018 at UTC 11:12 for the nerds) The globular cluster M22 is also visible: And a GIF version: I did get some more data over April, including M81/M82, Ceres, and Vesta, but M81/M82 was unimpressive and I haven't touched my Ceres or Vesta pictures yet. Flash forward to May and I move in with my girlfriend, who happens to live under Bortle scale 4 skies! (It's dark enough to see the Lagoon Nebula clearly with the naked eye given some time to adapt to the dark!) Of course, I leapt at the opportunity and did some imaging before the Moon came back. This was my first light: 22x14" lights, 9 darks, no flats, bias, etc. Taken on my Canon EOS 350D at 35mm f/4.0 and ISO 1600. Some clouds were in the way, the raw converter clipped my data and the image has a lot of strange camera artifacts but it is my very first decent MW shot so it's my baby. The bright yellow "star" is Saturn. I believe the asteroid Vesta is also in there somewhere. We're far enough from any city that light pollution is more of something you can ignore than a hindrance (if there's no clouds to bounce light around). The most intrusive source is by far the city of Albuquerque, which can still look pretty if you wait for an Iridium satellite to flare over it! I also got Omega Centauri: Omega Centauri is a fun target because it doesn't get very high here where I live. Only ~5.5 degrees at culmination! It's also big in the night sky so it's very forgiving for wide lenses. Perfect for a newb astrophotographer like me. (75mm f/4 lens, 2x crop, 45x6" lights, no darks, flats, bias , 4.5 mins total integration) Rho Ophuichi: Rho Ophuichi is an even wider target, spanning nearly 13 full moon widths on the celestial sphere. I'm not very happy at all with the background colors and the smearing DSS created combining data from two nights, but at least the stars look the rightish color thanks to Roger Clark's lovely stretching algorithm. (35mm f/4.5 lens. 2x crop, 167x14" lights, no darks, flats, bias, 40 mins total integration) This is becoming a long post, so I'll finish off with the HST data I was talking about. One of my favorite visual targets is NGC 6818, The Little Gem Nebula. So for fun I dove into the Hubble archives and processed some raw FITS images of the Gem from 1997. I've already posted a lot of images and I'm not sure if it counts as "astro imaging" so I'll post my version of the Little Gem in spoiler tags. Enjoy and clear skies everyone!

Hey all, just a question. Would it be acceptable to post some Hubble data I've processed here? I've seen sites like Astrobin and APOD allow it but something about a 2.4 meter telescope in space seems like cheating. Cheers.

I have a backlog of stuff. I hope y'all don't mind a little bit of an image dump. Caught Mars and Saturn passing near globular cluster M22 this morning. Image is a stack of six 5 second subs with a Canon Rebel XT DSLR and a 75-300mm lens at 105mm. Some fun with remote observing. If you need some data to play with or don't have a scope of your own check out MicroObservatory. Free 6 inch Maksutovs for public use! Here's a 60s RGB image of M42 after some processing. Some artifacts and the color balance is odd but hey it was free! http://mo-www.cfa.harvard.edu/OWN/index.html And finally a lunar phase timelapse I shot with my DSLR at 300mm (and then some cropping afterwards)

I'm still playing on 1.3.1 and have RO on 1.2.2. Not much about 1.4 or Making History interests me so I'm probably gonna stick to those versions for a while.

Not upset. It's been like this since the first versions of the game. Modders are ultimately humans with responsibilities beyond KSP so it's not really fair to expect mods to be updated right away. Personally I keep old copies around to play while I wait for mods to update. I'm not ready to part with my 1.3.1 save and I have an RSS save still running on 1.2.2.

Today I pushed my Jackdaw-R* lifter to its limits with some heavy payloads. Launch #1 sent up a second node module for the Kerbin Space Station, and launch #2 sent up a 6-ton salvo of 12 commsats into a 230 km polar orbit. *R is for reusable. I'll think of a proper naming convention later. Launch #1 was full of surprises. The heavy payload gave us little delta-v left to work with up in orbit and a prolonged rendezvous meant there was only minutes left of battery power left by the time docking occurred. Nonetheless it all came together and the KSS now has a node to affix a cupola, airlock and science lab. Of course it's never that simple. During the return flight the Jackdaw booster core engaged in an unplanned dendrobraking maneuver. It landed in a tree. Launch #2 was much more uneventful, despite it being the first polar launch of the Jackdaw-R. The 12 satellites do not have enough delta-v for total global coverage and generated a large amount of debris during their deployment. At least 4 more sats will need to be launched for total coverage of Kerbin. Global coverage of Kerbin will allow the Minmus comms relay to have uninterrupted communication with KSC and nearly anything within Kerbin's SOI. Also it's just cool to have a lot of sats flitting about.

I landed in a tree...

Hoverslams are serious business.

Tested the Mun capability of my reusable Jackdaw launch vehicle and practiced Near Rectilinear Halo Orbits around the Mun. NRHOs are useful because they're easy to transfer in and out of and they experience no comms blackout. Ideal for a Munar gateway station. The payload in a NRHO around the Mun. Plotted Kerbin-Centric-Inertial the orbit looks like a delicate dance with the Mun. And it is. The probe experienced an unplanned lithobraking maneuver with Munar surface after 2 orbits due to operator negligence. The results from this mission show that Munar NRHOs are just too much of a hassle to be worth the effort in KSP. A Munar NRHO requires station-keeping at apomune every 4 hours, contrast with a real NRHO around Luna which would only require corrections once per week. The benefits just aren't worth it. Because of this, the boys in Mission Planning decided that the Munar Gateway will instead be on a frozen polar orbit around the Mun and that a comms station will be situated on Minmus' north pole to cover for most blackouts. Also possible is a Munar satellite constellation, though the stability of those orbits are yet to be determined. Having proven itself capable, the Jackdaw was given clearance to launch the Minmus Comms Station. One of the heaviest payloads ever launched by the reusable variant, the lifter still succeed in getting the comms station to Minmus while having enough fuel for a return and landing.

smack

Some stuff from my current RSS save. Getting to the moon? Easy. Getting to the moon from Baikonur? Nightmare.

Thank you for the advice. My scope is poorly made and lacks any way to collimate the primary mirror, but I'll see what I can do.

The Montes Alpes range and surrounding craters on the Moon. Taken last month with my phone and a 114mm Newtonian. Stacked in Autostakkert! 2, wavelets in Registax and stitched in Photoshop. Annotated:

Hey all. I used to be pretty active on this forum but life and other websites drew me away. Haven't played KSP in a while and I missed the community here so I guess this is my announcement that I'm back. That's all. Have a nice day everyone.