What can you expect from new cooled CMOS based cameras in DS astrophotography?
In the upcoming weeks we will see new cooled ZWO and QHY cameras with Sony CMOS sensors. Those cameras can do Solar System as well as DS imaging and will be somewhat cheaper than most DS cameras. So do those cameras are as universal as they suggest?
Altair Astro enters planetary imaging market with a cheaper ASI120 counterpart
When ASI120 and QHY5L-II prices are kept at around 300 EUR a new competitor enters the market at a much lower prices of around 200 EUR. Altair Astro GPCAM equipped with the same MT9M034 as in ASI120MM/MC may clean up all of the entry level
planetary cameras and more.
Check out PyCon PL 2015 agenda
The PyCon PL 2015 will be held in Hotel Ossa Congress & Spa located in Ossa on October 15th through October 18th. The conference is held in Poland but consists of two blocks of talks - English and Polish, so non-Polish speaking attendees can benefit from it too.
The agenda and other details can be found on the conference website.
New color ZWO ASI224, ASI185 and ASI178 cameras available for preorder
ZWO is pushing three new cameras with Sony IMX color sensors - ASI224, bit bigger ASI185 and ASI178 with smaller pixels. The preorder prices are around 365 - 400 EUR.
Diet gaming laptops for casual Witcher 3 gameplay
There were times when new Microsoft Windows version required you to upgrade your whole PC. Nowadays newer Windows versions require less resources and don't really force into upgrades. In 2015 something did required some GPU upgrades, it wasn't Windows 10 but Witcher 3 Wild Hunt.
So what if you want to play Witcher 3 on a Laptop. You don't want to use/buy a gaming PC, Xbos or Playstation or a full blown gamin Laptop. What are the options for cheapest laptops that can run Witche 3 at somewhat good, but not high settings?
Squashing and optimizing migrations in Django
With Django 1.7 we got built in migrations and a management command to squash a set of existing migrations into one optimized migration - for faster test database building and to remove some legacy code/history. Squashing works, but it still has some rough edges and requires some manual work to get the best of a squashed migration. Here are few tips for squashing and optimizing squashed migrations.
Solar System imaging cameras of 2015 - winners, announcements and new cameras
We now have 2015 so it's time to have a look at the Solar System imaging market. What changed since 2014, which cameras turned out to be great and what will the future brings?
Performance of AMD A8 APU on Xubuntu 15.04 with radeon and fglrx drivers
AMD can't compete with Intel in the field of raw performance in general, but it gets interesting when you look at some specific price ranges or product types. You can find AMD chips in some laptops offering decent CPU and good GPU performance. There are also affordable mini-ITX boards for AMD APUs that can compete with Intel Bay Trail boards.
How does AMD based computer (a EliteBook 725 G2 laptop in this case) performs on modern Linux distribution? What is the difference between open radeon
and close-source fglrx
graphics driver? Is the user experience as good as with Intel or Intel+nVidia based laptops?
FireCapture quest for new camera support and the Mallincam SSI
FireCapture will support a new user-picked camera, and the voting is done on FireCapture Yahoo group. Among votes Mallincam SSI showed up. At first I though it's yet another TV camera (they make a lot of those), but it turns out it's a Tucsen branding of their USB2 cameras.
Let's have a quick look at Mallincam SSI / Tucsen Discovery M15 and the sCMOS marketing magic.
Sony to stop CCD production, DS photographers in panic
In two years Sony will stop CCD production and stop shipping after 2020. This news was quite normal
for machine vision industry, but on astrophotography forums it spread bit of havoc and panic... yet there is nothing to fear, as CMOS can handle it easily...
