Tinkering with AI coding some more, I decided to try to make a live ISS viewer that displays the ISS + the Earth in their current positions. Took me a couple of hours to get to this point: the app works on both desktop and mobile devices reasonably well, which is something that I've struggled with in the past, so that is kind of cool. Anyway, for your enjoyment: https://mvandewettering.com/iss-view.

Digging through old photos, I found this curious still life, which I believe was shot using a primitive camera I built as part of Eben Ostby's class on primitive photography as part of Pixar University. It was constructed from foam core and used a simple lens as the objective and imaged onto photo paper, producing a paper negative which I inverted here with gimp. (https://www.amazon.com/Primitive-Photography-Cameras-Calotypes-Alternative/dp/0240804619 was the text we used, recommended)

The telescope focuser made with #3dprinting looks like it will work pretty well. More details at: https://brainwagon.org/blog/2026_04_19_new_focuser_3d_printed/

Simplified the design of a Crayford focuser body for #3dprinting. Uses less hardware, is easier to print, and sturdier. It would be great if I could do it without any supports, but I think I am satisfied with it as it is. Inspired by https://www.printables.com/model/125438-125-crayford-focuser-for-telescopes

This is "Club Fight" a soilitaire game that began as an experiment in using free Ollama cloud models (Minimax 2.7 in particular) with the pi coding agent. It derived the rules by absorbing a transcript of a YouTube video describing the game. I got pretty far, but then exhausted my free weekly cloud allotment on ollama, so shifted to Google Gemini to finish. Total human time: about 2.5 hours. Best on desktop, haven't play tested on mobile. Play at https://mvandewettering.com/clubfight

I was annoyed to find that Trader Joe's Peppermint containers are a different size than Altoids. I made a little divider tray that goes inside (3.0" x 2.25" x 0.625", with 8mm corner radii) and uploaded it to thingiverse in case anyone needs one. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7333285 #3dprinting

2.3 hours of exposure last night on M108, aka the Surfboard Galaxy. #astrophotography #seestar

My morning "sift through old S50 data, and try to use it to get better at processing with Siril" experiment. M16, the Eagle Nebula.

More tinkering with a dataset of the Rosette Nebula that I got last week.
#astrophotography

Today's tinkering with an AI was implementing a particular instance of railroad shunting games called the Inglewood Sidings puzzle, which you can play at https://mvandewettering.com/inglewood/ It's a computer implementation of a model train puzzle created by Alan Wright, the basic idea being to form a train of five cars chosen at random from eight placed on three sidings. Each siding has a limited capacity A=3, B=5, C=3, D=3, and you must extract them in order. Claude/Gemini and I colaborated.