Thanks, what is Vulkan....programming language?
Vulkan is a graphics and compute API - what SE is currently using is OpenGL, which had its last stable release in 2017.
It should also enable better performance related to graphics, and also supports compute shaders.

We're also using this ...

Timing is important. If you want to judge the effectiveness of lockdowns, we should look at the time frame where lockdowns were the most important factor. That was during spring and summer of 2020. Sweden's excess mortality rate then was higher than almost anywhere else in Europe except Great ...

Covid is not gone, but enough time has passed to evaluate the countermeasures like lockdowns, social distancing, face masks. The following statistics is interesting. As we know, Sweden remained largely open. This does not mean that everything was business as usual, individual common sense could ...

Thanks, what is Vulkan....programming language?
Anyway no rush, having shadows by the end of the year would be a nice New Year 2024 present ahead of the big total solar eclipse coming next year!
I hope it will include accurate penumbral shadows too, something Wat and I and Mid have been discussing ...

Wow this is fascinating, Wat....how wide would the area under a total solar eclipse be on both Charon and Pluto?

Half a millimeter wide penumbral shadow sounds surreal....I hope when shadows get done on SE we'll be able to see this (on rocks and mountains/hills/cliffs of course, but maybe we could ...

That sounds very interesting, I wonder if that means there is no penumbral shadow?

So glad to see you back Vlad!  I run on medium settings myself at 1080P for SE... is that what you are doing too?  I hope you are doing better now!

Nice to see you again, vlad! Comet McNaught was indeed spectacular and caused quite a stir in astronomy/astrophotography circles. I wish I could have seen it. In terms of overall brightness it seems comparable to Hale-Bopp in 1997, but McNaught's tail spread much farther across the sky. I'm ...

I would definitely either set focus to infinity or focus manually. Comets are too faint for autofocus. For other settings, just think like any other astrophotography: you want large aperture (low f/#) to gather light, moderate ISO, and the longest shutter speed you can manage before trailing ...

Thanks, Hale Bopp is always going to be my benchmark comet until something brighter comes along but I hope this one can be pretty good too. I didn't have a camera back when Hale Bopp came around but I want to photograph this one. I hope it isn't too difficult and any advice on focal length, focal ...

Wow this is spectacular and also gives me some idea what to look for next year during the total eclipse! Thanks so much, Wat!

It looks otherworldly even before totality!

The most I have ever seen is a 90% partial eclipse and that was many years ago (May 1994) and it was mostly cloudy that day with ...

And how much of a difference would be between day and night Pluto vs the night side of our Moon?

The dayside landscape of Pluto is darker than the Moon's, but you might struggle to tell except with a side-by-side comparison (especially because the Moon's surface is intrinsically so much darker ...

Plugging the current orbital elements into Stellarium, it predicts a magnitude of 0.77 with the comet 23 degrees from the Sun on September 28, 2024, and 0.34 magnitude at 14.5 degrees from the Sun on October 6th. The earlier view will probably be better -- being almost 10 degrees further from the ...

Wow, this actually looks like some of the airless procedural worlds/moons in SE! I guess SE did a pretty good job of indicating its surface brightness? I wonder how the icy regions on Pluto look-- doesn't Pluto have a lot of ice on it-- even entire mountains made of ice? I bet those would look ...

Thanks! I haven't found a comet thread on here, so I'll post this here....do you guys think this comet will be major? I have trouble believing this will be a great comet, because Mag 0 seems a bit dim for great comet status (some of whom have been brighter than the full moon Mag -12 and easily seen ...