CIRCLE WITH A DOT

I processed my Soul Nebula data from my Death Valley trip a couple of weeks ago. This is a big star formation region in Cassiopeia, 6,500 light years away.

This is 116 two minute subs, shot with an astro modified Canon EOS R8 and an Askar 71f (490mm f/l) scope. I used NINA and a guide scope in the data acquisition too. The mount was an AM3N.

The bulk of the processing was Siril, including Starnet++ and Cosmic Clarity, with a little more noise reduction help from Topaz.

I think this could use some more data, so I’m in the “astrophotography is never done” phase of things.
#astrophotography

@DavidPenington I wouldn’t say that the Pfizer covid vax has been killed — not yet, anyway.

But by imposing new, large trial requirements for an annual strain revision for a given population subset, the FDA is doing its best to make up-to-date Covid vaccines uneconomical to produce. If they are successful, then that impacts vaccine access for everyone.

But! FDA decisions are not set in stone. See for example the pending Moderna mRNA flu application, about which they originally said they wouldn’t even look at the application, promptly ate shit on, and then decided to review after all. Trump is only getting weaker, and therefore is more susceptible to pushback — before the midterms at least.

Double-reverse: FDA now says it will review Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine

CIDRAP (www.cidrap.umn.edu)

@0f4d0335 @paul_ipv6 last year’s vaccine rollout was indeed a cluster fuck. For a while the pharmacists were telling a 89 year old relative of mine that she wasn’t eligible!!!

Just one of many, many, many unbelievably bad things about Trump.

@paul_ipv6 @0f4d0335 agree, that is a tiny plus in what is otherwise a completely depressing environment.

@0f4d0335 @paul_ipv6 pardon me for butting in … but the way I read it is:
- there may or may not be an updated 2026-2027 covid vaccine from Pfizer. This will get decided at the upcoming VRBAC meeting.
- but if there is, the FDA won’t approve it for healthy non senior adults because Pfizer could not meet these huge placebo controlled requirements that Prasad instituted.

But: if you are a person in that age range and want to get one this fall, I’m pretty sure you could look over the high risk conditions list and get yourself eligible. And since Prasad is leaving and Trump’s pollsters are telling him the anti-vax shit is hurting the GOP as we head into midterms, these new approval requirements could get amended (until midterms are done).

Medium term, I think the game plan is to make mRNAs economically infeasible for the manufacturers and shut down vaccine access for everyone. So that means creating barriers to approval, reducing the potential market size, opening up manufacturers to vaccine injury lawsuits.

That’s my unsolicited two cents.

This is really quite bad. The FDA’s Prasad succeeded in creating enough regulatory roadblocks such that Pfizer gave up on its #covid #covid19 vaccine trial for healthy adults.

reuters.com

(www.reuters.com)

@mlanger it seems pretty unlikely that the entire vote by mail system in the state will get invalidated. Tightened ballot return time cutoffs due to this ongoing court case, I’m not so sure about.

I’m leery about returning my ballot by USPS, though. I’ll use the elections-run drop boxes instead, and get processing tracking texts to make sure it gets counted.

Regardless of what happens, I would crawl on my hands and knees through a field of broken glass to vote this year.

Washington State will have two initiatives on the ballot this November, thanks to right wing billionaire Brian Heywood. One would repeal the school Safety Act, and the other bans transgender girls from afterschool sports by requiring a special medical certification for all girls who want to play sports.

No Hate In Washington State is organizing against these initiatives, and you can find out more here: https://nohateinwastate.org/

I don’t think I’ve done red yet, so here’s some pretty perky flowers I saw on the way to Dante’s View. That goes up to 5,000 feet, so it’s not as brutal a neighborhood as life below sea level. #deathvalley

This is very good to see in Washington State. ICE and other law enforcement officers hiding their identities are meant to terrorize the population, thwart public accountability and are fundamentally incompatible with democracy.

Just a moment...

(washingtonstatestandard.com)

So … what is happening with ACIP in light of the recent court ruling invalidating most of its actions over the last year? Dunno, beats me. ‍️ Article by Melody Schreiber.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/20/acip-vaccine-advisory-committee

@mlanger I did not know it had a name! I thought it was “three inches of water on top of salt flats.”

Good to know!

Honestly, I can’t tell if this sign was meant as a warning or if there used to be an actual trail there so you could go check out the snake superhighway. #deathvalley

@douglasvb I believe my next post will answer this question

These little plants, doing the Lord’s work, trying to grow right next to the salt flats. #deathvalley

@douglasvb well the night sky was amazing of course. I have about five hours of the Soul Nebula I need to process. We did a lot of the hikes off Badwater Road, and it’s lots of fun poking around those canyons. Ubehebe Crater was stunning. It was formed only 2,000 years ago! I also didn’t grasp how much high country the park had. We got a taste of that with Dante’s View.

@douglasvb I think it was slightly past peak at sea level-ish, but very much ongoing at higher elevations. But honestly I have no frame of reference; I had never been there before. And I expect the current heat blast will be very hard on the plants.

I spent a few days in Death Valley and will be posting some pics over the next few days. Fair warning: expect a lot of “plucky little plants trying to survive in the world’s most inhospitable environment” content from me.

Ps: my botany knowledge is at the “yup, that’s definitely a flower!” level. More informed readers are welcome to chime in.

I collected more data on the Rosette Nebula, and gave it a reprocess. This time I tried out the new Veralux narrowband processing scripts in Siril to produce this pseudo-SHO image.

I based my workflow on Rich's Deep Space Astro tutorial, with a few changes. The tutorial is here: https://youtu.be/8UEDg_vCPWc.

The first situation I ran into was that some of the surrounding O3 looked splotchy after I upped the O3 gain in Veralux Alchemy to bring out the core. I opted to forgo the O3 gain in Alchemy and instead wait until I was finished in Siril. Then I bumped up the cool temperature in the core in Topaz, where I had masking tools.

The other thing I did differently was to skip the narrowband to RGB script for the starmask, and instead run it through the Veralux HyperMetric stretch, and then recompose the starless and starmask versions in Starnet++. I mean, it's already a false color palette, so it's pointless to worry about the star color police, right?

#astrophotography

49 * 300 second subs, Canon R8 astro-modified body, Canon RF 100-500mm lens, L-Ultimate filter, Bortle 8.5

Siril, GraXpert, Cosmic Clarity, Starnet++, the Veralux scripts, Topaz, Photoshop