iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Pity. I'll be interstate and away from telescopes.

Better placement this year. Sadly, I won't be able to have a go.

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Did you just? I might have to scroll back through your timeline.

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A couple of globular clusters from 27° south. Would have liked more time on M22, but the sky wasn't cooperating. 🔭

Messier 15, in Pegasus. A tight group with the core almost saturated after 23 minutes with a Seestar S50.

Messier 22, in Sagittarius. Close to the galactic plane, so the background is a rich carpet of stars. 10 minutes with a Seestar S50.

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Duncan Waldron @ozalba.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Will you be recording Mars's journey through the Beehive over the next week or so? Someone ought to.

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Tch tch tch, punchinit armbold bringin constibole and much "'ello 'ello, is this man botherymost", and runnit like the clappers. Oh yes.

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Duncan Waldron @ozalba.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

A' that saut watter spray. "That's a nice Pentax you've got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it."

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Duncan Waldron @ozalba.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Went see my doc about a sciatica problem. It's seems my hip flask is to blame.

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Shoulda brought another two. Then they could have been secret.

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Well, at least it confirmed that there's something different about me. Maybe ten years from now, the diagnosis might be different. Good luck with your exploration.

I went for a diagnosis recently, but the best he could do was brand me "idiosyncratic". I left feeling unsatisfied.

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Ah, Scottish weather; how I miss it 🤪

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Tonight's images from the same prompts: 'dark mendacity', 'the stillness of wondering', and 'an unknown quantity balancing on the edge of nothing'. Altogether more detailed and rich, but also, especially with those prompts, seeming creepily allegorical in the face of what AI is becoming. Umm...

A triptych: (1) A dark montage of a male face with a conspiratorial sideways expression and a hand holding a theatrical 'comedy' mask, while the rest of the image seems to be the Palace of Westminster and St Paul's cathedral, plus a pile of old papers and books and a quill and inkpot, and some silhouetted figures including a man in a top hat; (2) a lone figure with tousled hair sits on a rural hillside gazing at a sunset scene over water; (3) a small stylised humanoid robot with spindly arms and legs steps off the crumbling edge of a piece of level ground that seems to float above a dark region below.

Here's a composite of 3 DALLE•2 images from 2022-2023. The prompts were: 'dark mendacity', 'the stillness of wondering', and 'an unknown quantity balancing on the edge of nothing'. Whimsical little sketches. (Might only show the central image in the triptych, in the preview.)

Atriptych: (1) a strange graphic face with eyes shut, possibly looking downwards, possibly through a circular aperture surrounded by dendritic tendrils; (2) a Dali-esque tree-like melting structure that seems to incorporate a face looking down with eyes shut; (3) a slightly stylised figure floats above an uneven rectangular object with a dark mass upon it, all set against a plain beige background with white space above the "horizon".

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After discovering the LLM's tendency to fabrication, I started to play with image generation—in particular, throwing nonsensical, abstract prompts at it, to see what came out. That was in 2022-2023. I've just gone back to the current version of ChatGPT to see how it handled some of those prompts.

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Duncan Waldron @ozalba.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

When I first heard of ChatGPT, and the DALLE•2 image generator, I spent some finding out what they did, and where they fell down—and I must say, I found out pretty quickly how fallible they were, which makes it all the more surprising to me that lawyers and academics have been tripped up by LLMs.

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Hello granny, and best wishes for a very happy birthday from Queensland, Australia. I'll raise a cuppa to you tomorrow ☕️🎂

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Duncan Waldron @ozalba.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Agreed - and I'm amazed there were that many sunny days on the west coast of Scotland! As for the small Suns: with a very short exposure (or a Sun filter), the Sun's image doesn't get swallowed in a big bright blob. It's just 0.5° across, and the image is ~80° vertically, hence the small disks.

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Duncan Waldron @ozalba.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Most of the exposures were very short, just recording a disk for the Sun. Only one single shot is needed with sufficient exposure to record the landscape, and produce a bright patch where the Sun is. The shadows are long because ... well, look how low the Sun is in winter at midday.

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The rare US-made Leica. Yee-haa!

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Strange you should mention it—no.

Great example of why disposable email addresses are the way to go, for subscriptions and the like. Cf duckduckgo.com/email/settin...

Duckduckgo private email address generator.

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I think he's talking about squrls. They're a menace. As are folk over the pond that say ditn't instead of didn't.

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When necrotizing fasciitis goes untreated.

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Duncan Waldron @ozalba.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Never came across them, which I'm surprised about. The rocket, the camera, and the telescope and microscope would have been right up my alley, eventually.

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I suspect nobody got the reference 🤷‍♂️

Duncan Waldron @ozalba.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Maybe your mother can perform it them. You'll have to whistle. I sometimes have it as the walk-in music in the Skydome. One of my colleagues was in before I'd admitted the audience one day, and thought the music player had stopped, so pressed play, which brought up the last-played track :-/

A planetarium dome showing the words "Music now playing: 4'33" by John Cage".

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Duncan Waldron @ozalba.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Are you going to perform it on your theremin?

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Thanks Rami. My annual burst of practical astronomy 🤪 I'd have preferred a bit more twilight, but it'll do.

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...and this in about 15 minutes?

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Here's a later one, near end of twilight. About 2.3° between them now. 🔭 Taken with a 50-year-old Vivitar Series 1 70-210mm zoom leans that I was given recently. Performs decently, IMHO.

$Venus and the Moon in a near-dark sky. Venus shows diffraction spikes from the lens diaphragm, and the Moon's night side is lit with Earthshine, while the dayside crescent is overexposed.$

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Among other things, it shows how dim the Moon is, compared to Venus. Venus is around 6 times more reflective than the Moon, and the level of sunlight is about half that at Venus, so per unit area, it's about 12 times brighter, or 3.5 stops in photographic terms.

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Duncan Waldron @ozalba.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

If you're west of the Indian Ocean, you may yet have the chance to catch Venus and the Moon in daylight. 🔭

An almost-clear blue sky with the crescent Moon seen dimly against the blue, and a bright dot above that is Venus. An inset shows the overexposed image of Venus as slightly crescent-shaped.

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...not blessed with a great understanding of elapsed time beyond 1/125 of a second...?

Screenshot of the start of a "Digital Camera World" article: "APS-C vs full-frame is a tale as old as time, and as a photography journalist, I’m..."

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Yeah, it's a pity there aren't more like them.

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And as Shania Twain sang, "OK, so you're Nigel Farage? That don't impress me much."

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Was listening to that this morning. It was daylight though, and sunny, with no pedestrians. Best not pedestricate on a motorway.

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Språklig moro for seieren. Also, I like "inwandered". It speaks of otherwhere.

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No, but occasionally I've found a pencil left behind by a visiting school kid, and thought "Oh, that's a nice one."

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Suppose you'd stopped dead, to give yourself a quick self-palm reading. Might she have carried on, oblivious to an impending collision?

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"Hatred draws itself on your face and it doesn't use nice pens." You have a way with words, my man.

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There'll have to be a few servicing missions though? Especially the infamous first one. That should be rewarding.