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dcf21.bsky.social
Astronomer, science communicator and software engineer. Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, developing the PLATO pipeline. Founder of https://in-the-sky.org
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My dad has given me some albums of photos my Great Uncle Ernie took in 1920s. I'm messing around making high-resolution scans. On 26 Oct 1928, Ernie had just bought a shiny new Sunbeam car and took a 75-sec exposure of the "instrument panel". Original print is tiny, but stunning detail @ 2400 dpi.

submitted 31 days ago • 0 comments

The folks at Collins have designed beautiful covers for our books! www.amazon.co.uk/Night-Sky-Al... www.amazon.co.uk/2026-Guide-N...

submitted 102 days ago • 0 comments

1/3 Been busy over the past six months, after agreeing to produce the star charts for the Collins Guide to the Night Sky (actually four books, as there are multiple editions). Last week, the last of 421 charts went off to the publishers. Now looking forward to seeing it in bookshops in late August

submitted 112 days ago • 1 comment

Amazon already appears to be taking pre-orders for these four books! I guess that means we need to get a move on with writing them... 😮 www.amazon.co.uk/s?i=stripboo...

submitted 212 days ago • 0 comments

Kate is a former colleague from my podcasting days, before she moved onto greater fame. She's a brilliant science communicator, who has really great ideas as well as the patience to teach people as untalented as myself. It's a real pity if the BBC doesn't want to employ somebody with her talents.

submitted 278 days ago • 0 comments

A couple of years ago, I wrote a tool for creating charts of the night sky, and shared the code on GitHub. Over the summer, a client asked me to create a large number of sky charts, which means I've added lots of new features and fixed lots of issues. I've just released these as v6.0.

submitted 287 days ago • 0 comments

Hey folks. I appear to have finally taken the plunge and decided to join you on Bluesky... Better late then never! :-)

submitted 336 days ago • 2 comments