Observations 10/25/2026

Richard P. Hill

Present: N/A

10/25/2026

• Weather Conditions

  • Various Nights and Moon Conditions

• Equipment

  • DwarfLab Mini

• Software

  • DwarfLab IOS App

It has been about a month since my last record. I have been very busy preparing a fellowship application, and I didn't have much time; thus, my research got put on the back burner. I will be attempting to pick up the work again, but I will have to wait for some clear nights; it will be cloudy for the next week or longer.

So why the smart scope? When I am short on time, I will continue putting out my smart scopes. It takes only about 10 minutes to set up either my Seestar S50 or my DwarfLab, so I always put them out on clear nights. Speaking of the S50, I will be selling it to buy another DwarfLab Mini. I got one only a few weeks back because I wanted a telescope that could travel on planes and be used for hiking, but the imaging quality has been much better than my SeeStar S50. Below are some of my DwarfLab Mini shots so far. I will wait until I have roughly 100 hours of exposure before writing specific reports on some of the images. Currently, I am collecting data on Andromeda and the Tadpole nebula, but it will be a bit until I have all of that data; thus, my partial data will be below. Another note: all of these images were stacked in the DwarfLab IOS App and edited on an iPhone. I will be editing the complete data sets once collected on a computer to try and pull out more color.

One other note. I have gotten behind on adding watermarks so many of my images, mainly because it takes quite some time. Before, I used ON1, the application I use to edit my normal photographs, but it was slow when it came to watermarking, and frankly, didn't look too good. I decided to burn some of my school's paid-for AI tokens and had Claude cook up a very simple, one-file HTML site where I could drop photos and easily watermark them in bulk. It has been quite useful, but it definitely has bugs, so I will most likely rewrite it as a Python program at some point. I simply do not have time to do so right now. If you are a student who picked up my work in the future, either ask Kuehn or myself for the program. I'll have it up on my GitLab.

I will continue taking images on Andromeda and the Tadpole Nebula, along with getting the 11in Celestron Telescope out more often to get more images of Saturn, and later in the year, or early next year, I will be aiming for Jupiter. For the time being, I will be waiting for the clouds to play ball.

Please email me at rickyhillzero@gmail.com if you are interested in these photos. There are many more than is usually shown per report.