IC 1396 in Cepheus, a vast emission complex about 2,400 light-years away, with the famous Elephant's Trunk — a dense globule of gas and dust being eroded and lit from behind by the hot O-star at the cluster's heart — winding through the middle.
Read more →The birth of Tenrankai (展覧会 — 'exhibition'): a flat-file Rust gallery server that went from 'Init' to masonry layouts, EXIF extraction, a blog engine, passwordless auth with passkeys, and full AVIF HDR gain-map support in its first ten days.
Read more →M33, the Triangulum Galaxy in HaLRGB — 2.7 million light-years away, with hydrogen-alpha lighting up its star factories, from four hours of 15-second subs plus 3nm Hα.
Read more →Sh2-92, nicknamed "The Scream" for the anguished face that emerges in narrowband renders — a faint, rarely imaged H II region in Vulpecula.
Read more →The Tulip Nebula, Sh2-101, blooming in Cygnus about 6,000 light-years away — an emission region sculpted into petals by radiation from young O-type stars.
Read more →WR 134 in Cygnus, a Wolf-Rayet star roughly 6,000 light-years away — a massive star in its final act, shedding its outer layers in a ferocious wind.
Read more →The Andromeda Galaxy and its entourage — M32 tucked against the disk and M110 floating below.
Read more →The Veil Nebula complex in Cygnus — the shredded remains of a star that exploded ten to twenty thousand years ago, now a lacework of shock fronts some 2,400 light-years away and six full moons wide.
Read more →Sh2-119, the Clamshell Nebula — the North America Nebula's overlooked next-door neighbor, sitting just east of it in Cygnus around the naked-eye star 68 Cygni.
Read more →The summer 2024 launch push: case prototypes and thermal stress tests, 32V Meanwell supply prep, a CAN transceiver post-mortem that redesigned the module connector, ESPHome firmware features, the Split's honest derating — and the first units shipping.
Read more →The spring 2024 redesign that turned the DCBuddy into a real product: a single 12–36V rail, ESP32-C3 with ESPHome and Home Assistant integration, per-port current monitoring, CAN on the module connector, 20A capability — and a contract-manufactured batch build.
Read more →The original DCBuddy: one box to replace the pile of AC/DC wall bricks under a reef tank — dual ideal-diode-ORed supply inputs, 24V distribution, 12V and 5V step-downs, Neptune 1Link passthrough, and short-circuit protection on every port.
Read more →Eight years of salt spray plus a three-day blackout nearly killed every LEDBrick unit — condensation shorted the boards on power-up. Ultrasonic cleaning saved two of three; the third needed component surgery. Lessons about conformal coating were learned.
Read more →First prototype of a work holding tool, in this case the base plate, for milling a set of off the shelf cases from Hammond Mfg (1455 series). This is done on a scrap of 1/4" 6061, about 8x6" (its an off cut scrap). The intent is to use…
Read more →A quick little project as a spin-off of a larger common shared design for an aquarium controller, I've knocked together a small inlet sensor and 12V driver with 4 channels, allowing you to hookup a float switch or attach a DC pump…
Read more →Small design vignette for an LED driver design for freshwater LED lighting. In this example I'm using a 28 Yuji 5038 LEDs at 6500k and 98+ CRI. Since they are all in series, it offers about 100Vf, which is out of range for most of my…
Read more →Just a small vignette on the milling of a Hammond Aluminum Extrusion case cap. All I have is a CNC6040 based machine with a 2.2kW spindle, but it would probably serve the purposes fine as we're not chewing through a lot of metal.
Read more →Some updates for products over at blueacro.com - mirroed from Reef2Reef
Read more →Let's talk temperature sensors, at least let's talk about the guts of a temperature sensor and less about the housing, cables, etc.
Read more →I've been keeping aquariums of all flavors for a very long time, and have seen and first hand experienced what happens when our lovable basic heaters (and chillers) run amok and fail to do their jobs correctly. Even worse, we often…
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