MaxPeck

What mount are you using? Can you manually guide it? You don't have to keep the target dead center when shooting video, just close-ish. I've had planets wander around the screen a bit and never had any problem getting Registax to register the images.

@ProtoJeb21 DSS isn't a good tool for planetary work. Also, there's a trick to planetary that doesn't work with DSOs. DSOs are faint, so you need long exposures, but planetary objects are bright (the moon obnoxiously so). For planetary, the answer is quantity. There's an easy way to capture a ton of images. See if your camera can capture video. Use VLC or some other video editing software to convert each frame to an image, and for each minute of video you capture, that's 1464 images (assuming 24FPS). Even 5 minutes of imaging can yield an absurd about of imagery. Forget DSS for planetary work, the program you want is called Registax. 5,000 stacked images can produce surprisingly clear images of just about any planetary body you care to point your rig at. Just be aware that you'll need to adjust your camera every so often to keep your target in frame, which will mess up some of your exposures. Still, with such a high image count, you can afford to discard lots of bad images and be discriminating. Registax will actually do that for you. There are a ton of Registax tutorials out there, Google some and I think you'll be astounded at what you can produce from a thousand or so fuzzy images.

@kurja I haven't done much with PI because I use a Nikon and it's partial to Canon. I use Sequence Generator Pro for capture because it works really well with most equipment and plays very nice with PHD2. I stack, integrate flats and darks, and do rough processing in DSS and then use GIMP if needed mainly for editing curves and manipulating the histogram to tease out more detail. I've also messed around with Star Tools, but haven't really gotten far enough into it's learning curve to be useful. @Green Baron I don't really mess with filters because I'm using a DSLR. I tried using a sky glow filter once and got horrible vignetting and weird artifacts so I sent it back. Because of the bayer matrix DSLR cameras use (and Nikon in particular), filters can produce some weird effects.

@Diche Bach Not particularly. I'm in a zone 5 on the Bortle scale, just about at sea level. I'm about 10 miles from the city, so it's country-ish, but largely suburban. On really obnoxious light pollution nights, the sky to the southwest is always a purplish-amber color. I've gotten really good at using DSS and GIMP to reduce ambient glow and bring out the details on deep space objects. Here's some more... I consider this guy to be my crowning achievement thus far.. this is M101, did this with the same equipment as before, but this is about 1.3 hours of exposure time (out of about 2.5 hours of imaging time). This guy was a pain to get, and while it's not jaw-dropping, it was a bear to tease the details out. And then this is the "Witch's broom" part of the Veil Nebula. This was about 1.2 hours of exposures out of 2 hour session.

Here's one I did, Messier 51 with an Orion 120mm f/5 refractor mounted on an iOptron CEM25, taken with a Nikon D5200. This is about 30mins worth of stacked 2 minute subs. I think this is one of my best. Here's another one I did of M42. Same equipment, but about an hour's worth of subs.

Not saying this to be snarky, but it might be in the best interests of someone on the staff to address this so that we stop having these community panic attacks when a staff member is liquidated moves on to other projects. It seems to me the problem is disproportionate visibility - when a staff member dies tragically in a staged accident leaves the team, there is a big send-off page written by Squad's PR people the staff member who is leaving, whereas when new talent is hired, it often slips under the radar. Thus, people see the exits, but they don't really notice the new hires unless they're really paying attention.

Well I'm pleasantly surprised (and relieved). Wasnt a conspiracy theory, it was logic. Kasper wrote the devnotes. There hasn't been a daily kerbal entry in almost a week, and said author vacated his position. I didn't say there would never be devnotes again, I said we wouldn't see them anytime soon as Squad moves someone into Kasper's role. I am pleased to be wrong in this case.

Did you guys happen to notice that there have been no daily kerbal updates in almost a week. Also that Kasper quit? Something tells me there's not going to be devnotes anytime soon.

Everyone is overlooking the obvious, and that's the fact that one of three outcomes would come from a CD version of KSP: 1. I insert the CD in my computer. The CD remains rigid in space and the computer begins rotating rapidly and heating to absurd temperatures before flying off in a random direction at 1200 m/s. 2. I accidentally drop the CD while inserting it, and upon touching the ground it explodes and my house begins vibrating wildly before flying straight up at escape velocity. It bursts into flames before it leaves the atmosphere. 3. I insert the CD. The entire earth abruptly turns into a white glowing ball and the laws of physics stop working.

Seems okay to me. This is representative of a "configuration A" precision instrument approach runway. Runway touchdown zone markings identify the touchdown zone for landings. Runway touchdown zone markings consist of pairs of three, then two, and then one rectangular bar(s) on each side of the runway centerline, 500 feet apart. It's not perfect, but it's close enough.

I kind of like to think that Marketing and PR go hand-in-hand. They're very much the same thing - product promotion. This is a serious amateur mistake. I mean, they boast clientele such as HP, Coca Cola and Sony. Try to imagine if HP printers starting catching fire and Squad made an advertising campaign that was something like "Blaze your way into the future with HP printers!" Poor form, Squad. Bad play.

I'm confused. In every thread about some broken aspect of the game, we get the inevitable reply of "remember... Squad is not a video game company. This is their first foray into gaming." Squad's not a game company. That's true... THEY'RE A PR AND MARKETING COMPANY! How can this NOT be their strong suit? This is literally who they are outside of KSP. PR and MARKETING. I'm just at a loss for this one. I just can't even.

If you build it, they will come!

Nothing posted in the Daily Kerbal since last wednesday... has Squad given up?

Dude, have a Snickers bar.

It is. Kopernicus just updated and Nathan has an RSS update on his Github that he hasn't pushed out yet. I figured out that I screwed something up troubleshooting something else and turned Kopernicus off by accident.

Contract Configurator asked me to give you the following message: Exception occured while loading contract 'BasesandStations.StationCore': System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---> System.ArgumentException: 'Earth' is not a valid CelestialBody. at ContractConfigurator.ConfigNodeUtil.ParseCelestialBodyValue (System.String celestialName) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at ContractConfigurator.ConfigNodeUtil.ParseSingleValue[CelestialBody] (System.String key, System.String stringValue, Boolean allowExpression) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at (wrapper managed-to-native) System.Reflection.MonoMethod:InternalInvoke (object,object[],System.Exception&) at System.Reflection.MonoMethod.Invoke (System.Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, System.Reflection.Binder binder, System.Object[] parameters, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 --- End of inner exception stack trace --- at System.Reflection.MonoMethod.Invoke (System.Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, System.Reflection.Binder binder, System.Object[] parameters, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at System.Reflection.MethodBase.Invoke (System.Object obj, System.Object[] parameters) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at ContractConfigurator.ConfiguredContract.OnLoad (.ConfigNode node) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

So after installing the 1.1.3 update and the latest Kopernicus, solar panels no longer generate power. They show direct sun exposure, but show 0.0 exposure amount and 0.0 ec generated. I still have un-updated RSS installed, could that be the culprit? EDIT: Installed the latest RSS from the RSS Github page, still showing direct sun exposure, but still 0/0 for power generation. Trying to walk back some other mods to see if any of them are doing it.

So 1.1.3 seems vastly improved, but still not perfect. On load, it appears to use about half a gb less memory, and from appearances, seems more stable. Just for kicks I went into the VAB and the SPH and just started adding and removing parts with reckless abandon. I only got one crash in about an hour of building contraptions Rube Goldberg would be proud of. The floor markings in the VAB look better, but the flag on the wall is still spazzing out. The floor markings in the SPH still look like TV static in a lot of places. Gameplay seems pretty good too. Orbits seem a lot more stable, and docking resulted in no bizarre behavior that I could manage to conjure up. A rudimentary space plane was able to taxi around and take off normally with no spin-outs or other strange behavior. Flight was pretty good, and it even seemed like the aerodynamics were a little more responsive than normal. Landing, however, left something to be desired. I used Kramax to set up a RWY 27 approach, and everything seemed cool until touchdown, at which point the aircraft (with the fixed-style landing gear) ricocheted up like a superball dropped from the top of a parking garage and came down like a 5 ton pile of unaerodynamic trash and dynamite. Might need some tweaking, I think. In all fairness, that was the limit of testing I was able to accomplish before my children, who desperately need to go the heck back to school, presented me with their next list of demands. For note, I'm on OS X, with a handful of mods I'm too lazy to list. Also, no logs, screenshots or other contrivances for the same reason. @NathanKell, I'm tagging you on this just for general feedback. I'm quick to give negative feedback when patches and such introduce bugs, I thought it only fitting to provide some positive-ish feedback that you'll see as well. Good job squashing bugs (so far!).

Texture Replacer appears good-to-go. All my Kerbals still look human and my skybox is the milky way... so far so good.

As far as the program being self-funded/budgeted, I'm rather partial to this mod: But I agree that the science point balance is weird. You have to grind to get science on Kerbin/Mun/Minmus so that you can go interplanetary, but by the time you can get to the science point bonanza that is the Jool system, you don't need the points anymore. I'm not a fan of throwing trash into orbit, so I tend to find myself doing endless iterations of various climate scans on Kerbin before I can get enough tech to make something meaningful to launch into orbit, and then that thing does its one or two science experiments and it's useless. So usually I don't do any kind of orbital science until I can get a station into orbit, and then I use OSE Workshop to recycle the science parts that can't be reused. The field/station science contract packs help with that a little, but still, I like the way the casher mod makes tech more accessible when you need it.

I'm somewhat astounded that this thread hasn't turned into SarcasmFest 2016. I'm on a mac and I get the editor crashes enough that I now panic save pretty much every time I successfully add a part to a vessel. (Hey Squad: how about giving us a hotkey for saving the current vessel in the VAB/SPH!) There's clearly some kind of dark magic happening in those buildings, however, as can be seen in the weirdness in the floor markings, flags and other signage.

Groovy, thanks.

I'd like something that allows you to secure (and re-secure) payloads and rovers without having to use a docking port or a decoupler. A tie-down mechanism you could park your rover on and lock it in place, or recover a satellite and tie it down in a cargo bay without having to deal with awkwardly docking inside of a cargo bay.

I would like to change my name to MaxPeck, if you can. Thanks.