Mastodon isn't perfect.

But the fact a social network exists that is completely free to use

has no venture capital investors

has no shareholders to answer to

has no growth targets

with a web interface with zero tracking cookies

and mobile apps with zero trackers at all

with ten thousand server administrators who donate their time for user safety

is - in my opinion - mindbogglingly cool, given the state of the world we live in. Not everything has to be shit. People make things better.

Last night was beautiful and clear, with almost no moon, so we set our Dwarf3s up on the roof to catch some photons.

And up came a wind. Now my 3d printed roof mounts are good, but they do have a tiny bit of flex in them, and this showed. So I am now printing a revision to counter that flex. We'll see how it goes.

Despite the wind, I was still able to get quite a pretty shot of NGC2237 - The Rosette Nebula, and the various associated clusters.

The latest beta firmware updates to the Dwarf3 have added some interesting additional features - a machine-learning based noise reduction tool, and sub-frame dithering to improve image quality. The end result in suburbia still needs a little post-processing, but I am rather pleased with this shot - especially as it represents less than 15 minutes of exposure!

25x30s@gain80, Ha/OIII filter (inbuilt), and post processing the Snapseed and Google Photos.

#astronomy #astrophotography #Astrodon #Snapseed #GooglePhotos #Dwarf3 #Nebula #NGC2237