| Github | https://github.com/cbassa |
Hi everyone,
I just arrived from astrodon.social, where I've been tooting since about three years.
I’m an astrophysicist working in the field of gamma-ray astronomy at IRAP (@cnrs) in Toulouse, France. Since a couple of years I work on assessing and reducing the environmental impact of scientific research, and in this context I’m engaged in @labos1point5 and @a4e.
I’m also doing local politics as city and community councillor with a strong focus on environmental politics.
After two and a half years of building this community, I've made the decision that it's time to shut down Astrodon.social.
Since 2022, around 4,000 users have registered on astrodon.social. However, fewer than 10% of those users are active each month, and fewer than 1% post regularly. Because of the way Mastodon works, the data for every one of the those users, even the inactive ones, has to be kept forever and keeps on growing. There's no way to remove posts or archive them out of the database, and running a large database gets very expensive.
Running Astrodon costs more than €300/month, which means that the costs of running the server are primarily going toward servicing fewer than 50 active users, the most active of whom are organisations. Even with donations, Astrodon has now cost me more than €5000 to run.
While I’ve considered the option of turning Astrodon into a commercial service or creating a nonprofit, I’m reluctant to go down that route. Managing a business comes with a host of overhead tasks like tax reporting and navigating different tax regimes due to our global user base, which is something I want to avoid. My goal has always been to create a free and open space, but the reality is that the free part isn't sustainable.
I'm not shutting down Astrodon immediately. I want to give everyone ample time—likely over the next two to three months—to find alternative service providers and transition smoothly. This isn't a decision I'm making lightly, and I appreciate your understanding and support as we navigate this transition. If you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions, please feel free to reach out to me directly through DMs.
Tomorrow I will be going to the Tango community meeting. A three day conference on industrial control systems using the #Tango ecosystem!
This system enables monitoring and control for the #LOFAR telescope.
The talks from @astron will include details on how we achieved control through #Grafana and #gRPC as well as how we collect metrics using #Prometheus.
@destevez @radiotelescoop @OpenResearchIns Very cool!
My summary: International collaboration of amateur radio astronomers, at multiple sites, with heritage dishes still in service, bounce radar signals off Venus. They measure the doppler shift, of the reflections from the surface, due to the planet's rotation.
New blog post: Analysis of the CAMRAS Venus radar experiment. A deep dive into the Earth-Venus-Earth L-band radar experiment done in March by @radiotelescoop, Astropeiler Stockert, the Deep Space Exploration Society, and @OpenResearchIns.
I show how to compute the radar Doppler with SPICE and come up with a Doppler spread model based on an S-band scattering model from Arecibo. I explain why the maximum surface Doppler offset is 8.6 Hz even though the rotational velocity predicts 15.7 Hz.
A bit late, but here is some additional analysis of the Earth-Venus-Earth radar experiments with the Dwingeloo @radiotelescoop from March 22nd, 2025. It takes the 4 recordings at the Dwingeloo and Stockert telescopes and searches in Doppler frequency and Doppler rates for the radar reflections.
The original write up of this experiment is published at https://www.camras.nl/en/blog/2025/first-venus-bounce-with-the-dwingeloo-telescope/ and the data and an analysis script are publicly available at https://data.camras.nl/venus/.
Link budget calculations by @abraxas3d and others can be found at https://github.com/OpenResearchInstitute/documents/blob/master/Engineering/Link_Budget/Link_Budget_Modeling.ipynb.
Many thanks to the volunteers of the Dwingeloo @radiotelescoop and Astropeiler Stockert telescope (in particular @telkamp and @tammojan for making this experiment possible!
Ok, time for a thread on what I've been getting lots of interviews about. I've dropped some hints and shared some info, but here's the story!
Remember this document I posted a while ago? https://www.starlink.com/public-files/Starlink_Approach_to_Satellite_Demisability.pdf
It casually mentions that a piece of a Starlink satellite was found in Saskatchewan in August 2024.
Dr. Jürgen Knödlseder
Seb Potter
Thomas Telkamp
Dantali0n 
Ian Jackson
Daniel Estévez
Mike P
Prof. Sam Lawler