You don't normally think of finding a new career after the End of the World, unless maybe it's a career as a Road Warrior: a burnt-out shell of a man wandering out into the desolate wilderness with nothing but his Trans-Am, five gallons of gas, and a shotgun that doesn't work.
Or then again maybe that's exactly what I've done. Wasn't the Road Warrior fleeing a world that had crashed, and trying to get to a place where he could survive?
In a world where we can't go to restaurants anymore, or cafes, or bookstores -- I guess the bookstores were lost quite a long time ago, actually -- I have rediscovered a place where I can go, any time. Maybe I can be a Road Warrior after all -- but my road will be the Via Lactea.
I have rediscovered my old hobby of renting telescopes through the excellent service of iTelescope.net
And I have a new focus this time. I do not only want to look for Very Faint Objects -- although that is still certainly interesting.
Instead, I want to use these images to continue working toward what I have long imagined as Real Machine Vision. Start with just the stars and galaxies of deep space, and work my way to vision systems that could be useful for the automation of deep space asteroidal exploration and mining, and the deep space assembly of large structures.
We need a new type of image for this work -- we need COLOR! So my new routine with iTelescope is to take three maximum exposures -- 10 minutes -- with the red filter, then the green, then the blue.
With the excellent sensor that my telescope uses, we get 16-bit grayscale images (They don't actually look like the three pretty images up there ^^^ -- that there is what you call artistic license.) And then I will combine those three to make a single 48-bit-deep color image to use in my software.
The glorious iTelescope PlaneWave instrument T11, It's better than a TransAm!
I've never used color in these images before -- seldom used it at all, in fact -- but I see now that if I want to do real vision out there in deep space -- so far away that a phone call to Houston takes half an hour just to get there -- then I had better take every bit of data I can get. The use of color in some visual processes might turn out to be crucial.
Also, I will be writing my code in the new programming language love of my life -- Go -- which is C for the Twenty-First Century. I've done many image processing and simple-vision libraries before, which is why this new one will be called V6.
This is going to be fun.
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