Too bad, EAF is a major quality of life improvement!

Alternative way to carry this bundle is:

You know what, I might actually enjoy this deep-sky rig quite a bit. This thing is seriously fast, so that it gives me something like *this* with only 1.5 hrs total integration time and absolutely rushed post-processing with the simplest workflow I could imagine.

Look, in the field where "metal" is everything beyond hydrogen and helium, Moon astrophotography ("astro", he-he) is planetary work :P

Both are on AstroBin now: app.astrobin.com/i/o6ojbu, app.astrobin.com/i/v5uivn -- for future reference, as I should stop betting that BlueSky image processors do the right thing :)

Yes, this is why I loved it. But its pentaprism focuser is ass, especially coming from EAF-driven fine focusing elsewhere, and etalon uniformity leaves wanting. I am thinking this rig is viable visually still, but if I go back to full solar scope assemblies, I'll go for Lunt (pressure tuned) ones.

Oh, actually aligning on the comet shows that the tail develops minute after minute, so 1-hour stacking is hiding some details. Double-digit MB video here: share.shipilev.net/astro/2025-1...

Navigation lights from wing tips, yes. You can guess which way the aircraft flies from there.

Very crude stacking attempt to see if it even works. The airplane trail is... er... for scale. This thing is pretty fun to work with: the comet moves across the star field pretty quickly, so normal stacking techniques produce a mess. You need to get creative with star masks, etc.

Since folks are wondering how serious I am about this, note that 3 out of 4 figures in this one are from my own Java Memory Model talks. So this is as trustworthy as my usual tech jokes can get!

(On a side note, none of the astrometric solvers I have seem to be able to deal with the simple fact that my f/24 telescope has 57.6 meter focal length, and that my camera has 0.04"/px resolution.)