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#telescope

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After solving the IR LED issue, I pointed my scope at one of my favorite narrowband targets: The Crescent Nebula. This target has incredible detail in H-alpha, but the real star of the show for me is the blue OIII "shell" around it. With only 40 minutes of exposure time on that filter, it's already starting to show and will only get more pronounced with more exposure time.

Details: astrobin.com/zx3sfh/

[Le #JWST à la #CitéDeLEspace] La maquette du #miroir principal du #télescope spatial James Webb (JWST) fait son entrée à la Cité de l'Espace de Toulouse. L'occasion de (re-)découvrir l'histoire de ce télescope, depuis sa conception jusqu'aux #images récemment obtenues. Une soirée en compagnie de Pierre-Olivier Lagage, DR CEA, de Lucie Leboulleux, CR CNRS à l'Institut de Planétologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble et d'Olivier Berné, DR CNRS à l'IRAP.

Inscrivez-vous et venez nombreux ce lundi soir dès 18h15 : cite-espace.com/a-la-une/table

APOD from 2025-04-27

IC 418: The Spirograph #Nebula

The Spirograph Nebula (IC 418) displays mysterious patterns possibly due to its central star's chaotic winds. Once like our Sun, it evolved from a red giant to shedding its outer layers, leaving a core that will become a white dwarf. Located 2000 light-years away, this #Hubble image captures its enigmatic glow.

HD image at apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250427.ht #astronomy #telescope

#telescope-browser #gemini #mailcap

In praise of mailcap.

A while ago, I implemented a bastardised version of RFC1524 -- the RFC specifying how mailcap should behave (datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/)

Although it's considered old-hat these days, there's still applications which support it: (neo)mutt, imagemagik, elinks, etc.

It's a really good format for specifying mime-handling and applications to handle them, in a portable way. Originally used for mail applications, it's adoption has changed.

Timewas, /etc/mailcap was a file distriuted with many Linux distros to centralise this information.

Now, XDG has taken over -- and I can't agree it's necessarily been for the better.

Before I implemened mailcap support in #telescope, we discussed other alternatives -- and I'm glad we went with mailcap.

Why am I mentioning this?

Because recently, I had to configure a handful of applications, all of which had their own subtle and annoying way of doing the same thing.

Mailcap would have solved it for all of these applications had they used that.

IETF DatatrackerRFC 1524: A User Agent Configuration Mechanism For Multimedia Mail Format InformationThis memo suggests a file format to be used to inform multiple mail reading user agent programs about the locally-installed facilities for handling mail in various formats. This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard.
Earthshine nights are coming up on April 30 and May 1! These are the best nights to see the dark portion of a crescent Moon because the Sun’s light reflects off Earth and illuminates the Moon. They occur a few days before and after a New Moon.

#NewMoon #Crescent #Earthshine #Observing #Telescope #AllanICarswellObservatory #YorkU #Toronto #Ontario #Astronomy #Astronomer #Science #Astrophotography #SpaceScienceSaturday