iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I really need to aluminize my telescope’s mirror, but that first shot turned out great

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

My phone almost died on the plane so I resorted to literal napkin math. Trying to adapt axis-angle rotors from gamedev to astronomy using fft image alignment. I fear I’ll never get an engine dev job I’d like with all the layoffs so I hope this gamble works. The gutting of iD stings hard :(

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

Took a flight to Denver and wanted to measure the cosmic ray radiation when in the air. Finally figured out how to extract data and fit an MLE to the Geiger ticks. An exponential model from altitude to cps is a shockingly good fit!! cps ~ exp(A+B•H(C+Dt)) (Had to calibrate its clock via C & D)

GMC-300S Geiger counter, measuring 114 CPM with a bar graph showing counts per second.

Clouds seen out of an airplane window in the skies above Denver, Colorado on 2026 July 1.

Plot of fit data of the Geiger counter’s detected ticks to a Poisson distribution using an MLE. Orange is altitude data taken from FlightAware passed into an exponential model: exp(A+B•H), the blue dots are raw geiger data, the blue line is Fourier smoothed data. I calibrated the clock with 3 photos taken with my phone, noted as arrows with dashed lines and red text.

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

The model complexity spiked again. Now I'm doing full affine spectral gradients. The better the model the "more" seems to appear. The next step is a PSF spectral gradient, and its stressful. I feel like if I cant present at APS, a door in life closes. Classes keep getting in the way :( #astronomy

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

THE PHASE LOCKED It’s working It’s working It’s working It’s working It’s working It’s working It’s working It’s working It’s working It’s working It’s working (Almost) NONE of these objects are in the Simbad catalog! What a treasure trove. 128x128px, TESS sector 19, cam1, ccd1. #astronomy

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

I think TESS’s pulsar calibration has some precision issues. There’s significant subpixel drift in this test crop. But interestingly, we’ve got asteroids now :) I’m shocked at the number of variable stars in this tiny 64x64 section. I wonder if it’s like this everywhere? #astronomy

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

spectral volumes sure are *weird*. This is 32 frames of filtered TESS video, with a spatial blue noise filter (airy disc) and each image is accumulated via a sinc window. Each frame is a unique temporal frequency. Complex phase is hue. I think the waves are asteroids? They're plane slices!

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

Holy shit I finally got this #astronomy project with #gamedev tech working at a semi reasonable speed. 40 minutes per sector sure beats 4 days! Still not happy with it. Astropy is slow. SCIPY is slow. Nothing in this realm has a hint of systems programming and there’s SO much headroom for more.

Psuedospectral Fourier transform applied to time only per-pixel of Tess sector 4, Camera 1, ccd4. Plotted complex phase as hue, tonemapped luminance. Asteroids are visible as rainbow streaks, variable stars have a color. ~400 images used for a total exposure of ~1 week.

Lomb-Scargle Periodogram applied via a Psuedospectral Fourier transform on time only per-pixel of Tess sector 4, Camera 1, ccd4. I believe this is the same slice as image 1, but with real LS instead of complex phase.

Asteroids are visible as streaks. There are two gaps in the dataset associated with the earth getting in view of the camera, and data downlink. Both are visible in asteroid trails. The tile pattern is a failure of my algorithm to handle a lens flare.

Zoom in on a color test with the full two week dataset from image 1. Note the strange asteroid trajectory and gaps. I suspect this is a lens distortion artifact, which greatly complicates processing. It feels surprisingly similar to working with distorted normal maps!

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

#Astronomy feels SO much like peeking into a parallel world from #gamedev. Its fascinating. Its like if we only did pixel shaders for decades with color only, no normals Tested a 2048x2048 image convolved with a 32x32 kernel. Literally a bloom shader lol, ~500fps Gonna blow some minds with this

2048x2048 convolution with a 32x32 kernel performance comparisons. Time is log scaled.

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

I was finally given an astronomy research task, the first of which is to install something called "Topcat" Oh my god hello again web 1.0 I wonder how much room there is to transfer the last 20 years of graphics tech into this field. Java's a bit of an odd choice nowadays #astronomy

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

I was debating cross posting to the dead bird site for engagement. Every time I go there all I see are cool research papers! But then I scrolled a little further and between the research there’s “yeah, we SHOULD kill the Jews” and in every art reply there’s ai generated CP and Yeah I’m good.

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

Man I’m having such a shitty 2026 so far. • my nose was kinda itchy earlier God it hasn’t been my year. Can’t wait for 2027

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 25/12/2025

Whoops!! I forgot to share the results! It still has a few odd rendering bugs, this is a Kerr black hole. Runs in real time with my modified Kerr metric using a normal vector parameterization. Still couldn't squash the horizon reflections, but the frame dragging is super visible now!

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 13/12/2025

I was crunching to finish GR assignments (I need more time 😔) and had a realization. What if you remove gravity from GR? And it worked. Like, shockingly well. Is GR just a system to embed physics into a coordinate system? …isn’t this Lagrangian fluid dynamics? What a crazy plot twist wtf

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

Holy fuck I can’t fucking believe the Kerr reparameterization worked holy shit even the naked singularity works Sure some of the rays are bouncing off the horizon but rk4 is doing its best

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

Degenerate General relativity is such a wacky idea I’m shocked it’s working so well. Schwarzschild produced a genuine simplification when using a degenerate normal instead of true 4 parameters. Kerr’s demon is scaring the hell out of me though……….

General relativity notes on graph paper, deriving the Schwarzschild equation of motion for the radial term. There are pens at the bottom of the screen, and some glasses.

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

Used the tools I got from the Gaia renderer to improve my atomic force microscope renderer. God damn it’s satisfying to see in 3d. Shai-Hulud not included

3d visualization of an Atomic Force Microscope image. There are prominent wave-like structures on top of the dune-like structures.

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

It sure produces a cool main sequence render. You can see Gaia's MCMC implementation struggle hard here. I ought to come back and make a better one using forward MC instead, those artifacts (and the 1.3 billion culled stars) bother me a lot

Gaia dr3 main sequence visualization, unknown orientation.

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

Oh my god it fuckin works!!! 470 million stars render in ~90 seconds. The odd artifacts, streaks, and lack of milky way arms is interesting though. I wonder what went wrong? I betcha the blue streaks are galaxies.

Top down view of the milky way, 470 million stars visible. Log luminosity scale, there are weird artifacts.

Top down view of the milky way, 470 million stars visible. Log luminosity scaled by a power of 5, there are weird artifacts. The colors are way more prominent here!

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

Compressing this 700gb dataset has been super frustrating. Taking a break I wanted to see if I could plot the main sequence. I’m shocked how well it showed up, and how awful the published temperature and magnitude is!! The odd quantization error seems to stem from whatever their MCMC optimizer is.

Visualization of the Main Sequence of the ~200k good stars in the first Gaia dr3 chunk. Temperature on the x axis, luminosity on the right. This data is often presented with temperature reversed.

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

Oh my fucking god it works and it’s FAST

3d render of the first Gaia dr3 chunk. ~200k stars are visible.

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

Finally got the temperature mapping working from Gaia’s dataset. Oddly frustrating, and I don’t even think I got extinction right! The dust is still kinda visible here. I really hope I can boot performance from what I have so far before I begin processing all 3600 chunks…

Test render of a Gaia DR3 chunk. There are ~500k stars visible!

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

I suppose I need to commit to MIS hell early 🤪 I found Gaia’s passbands (it’s frequency response per color!) and that means I can do my vile human vision luminance spectra sampling to find per-star fits. Rip to my 12 bits per star metric lol

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

Holy fuck it works holy shit (50fps) Now I’ve gotta figure out how to reduce this down to the estimated 12 bits per star and I should be able to render the entire Milky Way. Not looking forward to the stochastic MIS hell to maintain performance when gravity shows up

Terrible photo of a chunk of the sky from the Gaia space telescope. I’ll get a better pic later.

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 15/11/2025

Looks like the circular BVH works! Now for a cuda test…

Image of a dense bounding volume heirarchy. Each square is a bounding box, containing two other bounding boxes, or two points.

Circular bounding volume hierarchy on a finite subset of the real data. Each circle contains two other circles. This picture is zoomed out.

Circular bounding volume hierarchy on a finite subset of the real data. Each circle contains two other circles. This picture is a closeup.

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

Delaunay tesselations are kinda neat! I hope the distance metric I want to use with them isn’t too slow though…

Whiteboard with Voronoi diagram sketches. Showing a difference between a correct and an incorrect Delaunay tesselation on top.

Whiteboard drawing of more Delaunay tesselation cases, along with an attempt at drawing a cell in a tetrahedron.

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

“I wanna render the Milky Way. I’ve heard the Gaia dataset is ~25gb! That’s not too bad” - statement dreamed up by the utterly deranged It was 700gb, took almost 24 hours But my god, the results are worth the wait

Right ascension / declanation of the first Gaia chunk. ~500,000 stars are in this image.

Screenshot highlighting the very large file size of the gaia3 dataset, along with a command line showing how long it took: 23h, 22m, 42s.

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

Hey! It’s been a while. Finally have something worth sharing: I’ve been tinkering with Stochastic Laplacian Interpolation and using it to raymarch an image. It’s tricky since the underlying surface is implicit and stochastic! The bugs are very pretty though.

Atomic Force Microscope image of a DNA sample, rendered with a 2d Laplacian heightmap. Odd bumps are visible in the image.

Atomic Force Microscope image of a DNA sample, rendered with a 2d Laplacian heightmap

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Been playing a lot of Voices of the Void lately, and it got me thinking, what if this was a real Radio Telescope? They produce images, right? What would they look like, and how do they differ to the optical telescopes I'm used to? 1/🧵

Screenshot of Voices of the Void. There are 7 radio telescopes visible within a forested valley, with a river at its base.

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

Holy shit I think my hail mary worked Im dealing with medical issues, but CSULB wants me to take one class. Ive been curious about one for a while: Statistical Mechanics. I added it week 2, professor was absent weeks 3 and 4, and first day I'm there? An Exam! And I think I somehow passed!!

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

Found this meme on the dumpster fire site, and it nerd sniped me. It was fun! Didn't take too long either. Definitely not hours and pages of work. It's the negative of the laplace transform of cosine, evaluated from a to b. Feynman integration strikes again (I hope the alt text is useful)

Solution to the math shitpost designed to piss you off. Uses Feynman integration to find that this is the Laplace transform of cosine in disguise. Integrating that instead yields the answer!

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

Watched a YouTube math video that setup this cool proof that involved finding the area where a square and a circle intersect, and the presenter said it’s unsolved. I uh… solved this for my physics report a bit ago, but it’s computationally hairy. Should I comment on the video? youtu.be/Y6bWUfmJ0-4

m.youtube.com

This Math Problem Stumped Everyone I Showed it To…

YouTube video by PurpleMind

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

I had a brain blast: What if my decaying psyche since 2022 is from the emergence of reels in all platforms? I don't mind the content, but I am very addicted to the swipe action. Feels like a gambling addiction. I hope I can use revanced for this too!

Settings menu for the "Enhancer for YouTube" extention. "Convert Shorts" is enabled.

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

I love when latex generates comfy text, but my god I really need to learn how it works under the hood. I can't quite figure out how to get the alignment to do what I want. This is part of an assignment for a class i got an incomplete in. I'll be posting more fun graphics about it soon!

Math algorithm written in latex, with colored indices. Describes a Monte Carlo method to find the equation written at the bottom.

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

Somehow, of all the things I’ve tried (antidepressants included), L-Theanine (a chemical in tea but not coffee), and Creatine (a workout supplement) are the most impactful in terms of energy reserves. I can finally start working again, but i can’t shake the feeling they’re placebos.

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Reposted by @copper-irl.bsky.social

Anton @antonhand.bsky.social · 20/01/2025

LA PEEPS, the wind is coming back hard tomorrow. With even drier air than on the 6th. Get your go-bags together and gas up your vehicles tonight!

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 11/01/2025

Got a glimpse of the Palisades fire from north Redondo last night. Stay safe yall!!!

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copper-irl.bsky.social @copper-irl.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

Hey! You might know me as “copperbotte” on twitter, where I post trippy math and graphics animations. I really should start posting here, but a mystery combo of energy depleting medical issues has me bedridden the past few months. Accessing said animations has been hard! I hope I can make more soon.

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