I work in CV and a lot of labs I’ve worked with use consumer cards for workstations. If you don’t need the full 40+GB of VRAM you save a ton of money compared to the datacenter or workstation cards. A 4090 is approximately $1600 compared to $5000+ for an equivalently performing L40 (though with half the VRAM, obviously). The x090 series cards may be overpriced for gaming but they’re actually excellent in terms of bang per buck in comparison to the alternatives for DL tasks.

AI has certainly produced revenue streams. Don’t forget AI is not just generative AI. The computer vision in high end digital cameras is all deep learning based and gets people to buy the latest cameras, for an example.

Yeah there’s a good chance you’re right. Maybe something to do with memory management as well.

Long term I’ll probably end up switching back to Darktable. I used it before and honestly it is quite good, but I currently have a free license for CC from my university and the AI denoise features in LR are pretty nice compared to the classical profiled denoise from Darktable. It does also help that the drivers for my SD card reader are less finicky on Windows so it’s easier for me to quickly copy over images from my camera on there instead of Linux. Hopefully that also gets better over time!

I don’t know exactly, but it’s apparently a thing. Some game anti-cheat software such as Easy Anti-Cheat will give you an error message saying something along the lines of “Virtual machines are not supported.” Some are easy to bypass by just tweaking your VM config, others not so much.

Fair enough! I think it’s more common for games to do that, but sometimes I had trouble with software on Windows that used virtualization elements themself. I probably just didn’t properly configure HyperV settings, but I know nested virtualization can be tricky.

For me it’s also because I’m on a laptop, and my Windows VM relies on me passing through an external GPU over TB3 but my laptops’ dedicated GPU has no connection to a display, so it would be tricky to try and do GPU passthrough on the VM if I were on the go. I like being able to boot Windows on the go to edit photos in Lightroom, for example, but otherwise I’d prefer to run the Linux host and use the Windows VM only as needed.

I’m a fan of dual booting AND using a passthrough VM. It’s easiest to set up if your machine has two NVMe slots and you put each OS on its own drive. This way you can pass the Windows NVMe through to the VM directly.

The advantage of this configuration is that you get the convenience of not needing to reboot to run some Windows specific software, but if you need to run software that doesn’t play nice with virtualization (maybe a program has too large a performance hit with virtualization, or software you want to run doesn’t support virtualized systems, like some anticheat-enabled games), you can always reboot to your same Windows installation directly.

Yeah I think Lemmy would actually work pretty reasonably. It reminds me of how lots of software and projects have Reddit communities. I agree that being able to share 1 account over many services, and especially not having to pay for infrastructure is something that drives discord use over forum-based platforms.

Personally, I’d prefer that projects use forums for community discussions rather than realtime chat platforms like Discord or Matrix. I think the bigger problem of projects using Discord is not that it’s closed source, but rather that it makes it difficult to search (since no indexing by search engines) and the format deprioritizes having discussion on a topic over a long period of time. Since Matrix is also intended for chat, it has these same issues (though at least you can preview a room without making an account).

Amazing work!

I was curious to know how you handle flats with this many nights of integration. Do you have separate flats for each night, or did you just take a total of 30 flats on a single night?

Thank you for the feedback!

I think you may want to increase your dither size (or do them more often)

Good catch! What happened was that I forgot to tick the box to enable dithering on the first night, so the first ~180 subs or so had no dithering at all, which definitely caused the pattern noise. That said, I’d be interested to hear if you know of a rule of thumb for dithering settings (i.e. how frequently should you dither, and how many pixels). When I was dithering on the second night, I dithered every 2 frames by 2 pixels, but I more or less picked those values arbitrarily.

Also if your tracking allows for some longer subs, you could try to HDR those with your 30" exposure

Gotcha, I’ll give that a try next time. I’m shooting with an unmodified and unfiltered camera from an urban area (Bortle 7-8) so I figured longer exposures wouldn’t help too much, but it sounds like it might still be worthwhile. Thanks for the tip!

Great shot! Impressive that you can pull this much out from just 78 subs.

As an added comment, I think INDIGO and Ain Imager are worth trying for anyone using INDI, especially if you’re using a Sony camera. Sony cameras on INDIGO have focuser support and in my experience the driver is much more stable. Furthermore, the architecture of distributed agents controlling different functions makes setup easier and more performant on low-power and potentially slow wireless systems like an ARM single board computer.

To explain that a bit more, I image through Ain Imager on my Linux laptop. However, this imager program is more or less just a frontend where I select options, but everything is executed on the agents on the ROCKPro64. This includes imaging and frame capture, guiding, and plate solving. This has some benefits compared to KStars + INDI. For example, you avoid the latency of transferring a guider image to a laptop and then sending a message back to the SBC with a guiding pulse (you can avoid this on INDI by running PHD2 separately, but then you have the overhead of running a whole desktop environment), and you don’t need to wait to frames to download before starting another exposure (they’re downloaded asynchronously instead).

(Disclaimer - I contribute to INDIGO occasionally but I’m not a member of the project, just an open source developer adding features to it)