xeon cores

 Xeon CPU E5-2696 v2 @ 2.50GHz in a z420 museum piece with 12 cores and 24 threads. It's not fast, but it certainly get's the job done. Hyper-T doubles the number of processes.

Here we are in SetiAstroSuitePro's stacking module:

homography star alignment with 24 parallel threads

Here are 70 fits frames calibrated and stacked in around 5 minutes... and processed in less than that. Fed up of staring at a comnputer screen!

march galaxies

Two good nights. Guiding averged 0.40 arc-seconds with quite small stars. Not too bad for a cheepo refractor I suppose.

sv550 with, 1.0x field flattener: 122mm f7: fl 854mm 

looking north

looking east

now with focuser

galaxy m106 and friends in canes venatici
atr533 on sv550    60x4min @ hcg100

galaxy m63 girasol in canes venatici
atr533 on sv550    52x4min @ hcg100

globular cluster m3 in canes venatici
atr533 on sv550    34x4min @ hcg100

m3 with a less in-your-face approach

 

kubuntu freeze delay

 Disable and/or remove:

• kwallet
• baloo
• kde connect

Maybe only the latter. Too lazy to go back and try.

HP z440 MEBx stuff

 To disable the statup messages concerning MEBx

AMT: Intel Management Technology

• Press F10 after power-on repeatedly to enter the BIOS Setup.
• Navigate to Advanced > Remote Management Options.
• Set Intel AMT to Disabled.
• Save changes and exit (F10)

some reprocesses

m97    gso203

m1    gso203

m106    sv550 80

 

vixen dovetail clamp

 Cheepo Vixen width dovetail plates, such as this one:

...are too narrow to fit the -equally cheepo- clamp. So we simply remove around a mm from the fixed mating surface:

z420 sata vs nvme

 We have two ssd drives:

  drive             volume                          mount
 sata III /dev/sda2         /
 nvme     /dev/nvme0n1p1    /home
 

sata III /  (530 Mb/s)

nvme /home  (2700 Mb/s)