You can get a copy the last freeware version Craig Stark released as he was putting the source code on github. You can download version 4.4.4a from the Web Archive site (the Wayback Machine) at the following link. (Note that if you install that latest version ever released directly by Craig, you need to get the license code also in order to run it after installation.
thanks guys but, tried both links and the downloads just sit forever loading then error code. I really only wanted Neb for the nice focus tool as the Sequence Generator Pro that I us for acquisition is not as good. Thanks again!
Wonderful! I looked at Nebulosity some years ago, but had never used it, now I took another look then went digging to find out why there's a free install code on the site, I just wanted to add my voice of thanks - contributions to the body of open source software like this are priceless, I hope you've made plenty of money out of it during the closed-source stage, and I absolutely support you in getting paid, but also wanted to acknowledge the great donation to the community all this work represents.
The problem I have been wrestling with the last years has such nebulosity. It started simple. Software development is slow in our organization and many organizations around us. One part of the problem, that many people complained about, is that the organizations contain many scientists who do not know how to develop software properly, and the professional software engineers do not understand the scientific domain. This causes lots of errors, both in the communication and in the software itself.
(This is a nebulous problem that can be generalized to any profession that involves people who focus on learning the domain, instead of building the products, say a business analyst, a financial quant or a mechatronics designer. Generalizing a nebulous problem makes it more nebulous and even harder to solve. More people will feel the shape of the problem, but it applies less to their exact case. This is a nebulous problem faced by high level thinkers in general, leading to proposed solutions that do not apply to the context. We have a potentially recursive nebulosity growth here.)
Scientists focus on understanding the universe, and occasionally build something for that reason. Engineers focus on building stuff, and use their understanding of the universe for that. Perhaps these activities should be kept separate? Or perhaps separation of these types of people happens naturally in large organizations and we should accept that fact of life? Or maybe we should allow a third group to arise, scientific coders, an elite group of people who help bridge the gap between the two cultures? Problems can become opportunities, right?
I have spoken with managers who believe there is no problem. They are quite satisfied with the two culture separation. They prefer the scientists to only communicate their findings to the software engineers via another medium than code. Maybe math-like pseudocode, written in ambiguous text documents, or haphazardly explained in a few meetings. Or perhaps the scientists share the incomprehensible throw-away example code. "Ambiguous", "incomprehensible" and "irreproducible" are keywords here, because the documents are never clear to the engineers, the example code is complex and doesn't reproduce. The software engineers are quickly confused and give up on understanding all together. The scientists become frustrated with the miscommunication and perceived apathy of the software engineers. The product development is delayed and the resulting code behaves incorrectly.
If you are interested, here is the original definition of nebulosity that I referred to: metarationality.com/nebulosity. It describes nebulosity far more in-depth than I did. Actually the entire meta-rationality blog seems to revolve around nebulosity.
The concept of nebulosity is fascinating in itself. A big step in your personal development may come from the conscious choice to stare nebulosity in the face. To accept its existence. A lot of that personal development is dealing with uncertainty, because many people struggle with uncertainty in life. Once you see nebulosity, you cannot un-see it. You may notice that all concepts are a little nebulous. Nothing is perfectly defined.
Edsger W. Dijkstra, famous in many ways, seems to defy nebulosity by noting that "The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise." This is interesting on several levels. First of all, I slightly disagree since abstractions are leaky, so their precision will fail under the right circumstances. Secondly, you should read the context of his thoughts. This quote comes from a lengthy lecture where he discusses all the misconceptions around programming. While the quote itself is about code, I can already see the two culture problem emerging in his talk as he laments about scientists who do not appreciate computers and programming. Observe how great thinkers struggle with this nebulosity, even as they confidently announce precision in some intellectual areas.
Here we come to the end of my introspection. I questioned whether to publish this blog post here on The Scientific Coder or on my personal website Functional Noise. Since I've applied nebulosity to scientific coding, this blog seemed like the right place. I believe it can help any of you deal with the stress and difficulties of being stuck inside this nebulous problem. Known that you are not alone and that it is no shame to struggle within this field of work.
I have nebulosity 4 & from what i have found is that the processing side is pretty much the same there is a good vidieo on you tube by the astronomy shed people i have not used the capture side yet due to either clouds or light pollution/ lightnights
In meteorology, an okta is a unit of measurement used to describe the amount of cloud cover at any given location such as a weather station. Sky conditions are estimated in terms of how many eighths of the sky are covered in cloud, ranging from 0 oktas (completely clear sky) through to 8 oktas (completely overcast). In addition, in the SYNOP code there is an extra cloud cover indicator '9' indicating that the sky is totally obscured (i.e. hidden from view), usually due to dense fog or heavy snow.[1]
In the early 20th century, it was common for weather maps to be hand drawn. The symbols for cloud cover on these maps, like the modern symbols, were drawn inside the circle marking the position of the weather station making the measurements. Unlike the modern symbols, these ones consisted of straight lines only rather than filled in blocks which would have been less practical on a hand drawing. A reduced set of these symbols were used on teleprinters used for distributing weather information and warnings. These machines were 5-bit teleprinters using a modified version of the Baudot-Murray code.[7]
There are some symbols in Unicode which resemble those used for oktas. However, some okta symbols lack a similar-looking Unicode character. The use of Unicode to render oktas depends on whether a font with these characters is installed; Unicode symbols may be difficult to work with in software that does not render these characters uniformly.
The cost of armoring is blindness to opportunity. Much good is left undone because an eternalist code did not recommend it, and much harm is done because the code required it. Less obviously, but perhaps even more importantly, we lose the freedom of courage: the freedom to risk, to take actions whose results we cannot predict. Armored eternalism condemns such creativity.
The antidotes are relaxation and de-escalation. As you learn that nebulosity need not be negative, you can allow ambiguity increasingly. As you allow ambiguity, there is less and less need to war against evidence of it.
Note:
35 minutes of total integration time is not nearly enough to yield a good quality astro image, especially in order to see the faint wisps of light blue nebulosity, nor the space dust that surrounds this star cluster. The reason for the short time is because this was my first time setting up in very cold temperatures this year (-17 Cesius wind chill) and I had all kinds of trouble getting things going. When I finally did "get the show on the road" clouds moved in and shut us down by 8:30 pm, hours before we were planning to. Oh well, I'll try to add more time over the next while.
This is a lovely image Rudy. It's great how you've handled the blue nebulosity around the stars. Nicely done. Since you live in the Ottawa area I'm wondering how you handled the light pollution/sky glow in post.
To the contrary, rnc-color-stretch has the full code viewable so you can determine exactly what math is being applied. Thus it is not a black box. I wrote the program because I determined that the regular stretching tools, like those in photoshop lost color as one stretches the image.
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