Shoot 2026-02-10-103506 — philthompson.me

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Mandel

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Shoot 2026-02-10-103506

On a few recent outings I managed to find some target birds: Horned Lark out on a farm road and a lifer Long-tailed Duck at the coast. I was scanning a wide area on the coast, looking for a Long-tailed Duck, without any luck. I stopped to examine a few other birds in my scope, and I was surprised to see a Long-tailed Duck pop out of the water behind a grebe in my eyepiece!

On the astro side of things, I pre-ordered the Dwarf Mini smart telescope a few months ago, and it finally arrived. It is similar to the Seestar S30 I already have, but the Dwarf is easier to polar align with a mostly obstructed view of the sky like I have, and it has a newer and better sensor. I'm happy with the first shots I took of M 33 and NGC 1499.

My "birds in review" collages can be found here.

Signature

📄 hashes-2026-02-10-103506.txt

📄 hashes-2026-02-10-103506.txt.sig

The above hashes-<date>.txt file contains SHA-256 hashes of all the photos from this shoot. The hashes-<date>.txt.sig is a signature of that hashes file, created with my PGP key. The signature file itself was written to both the Bitcoin Cash and Algorand blockchains, in the OP RETURN and Note fields respectively, using the transactions below. In short, this proves that these photos and the signature both existed at the time the transactions were written to the Bitcoin Cash and Algorand blockchains. This blog post has more details.

view the BCH tx on blockchair.com: f0011d7ef9dac3da2fc05b3a58d1748308be54e37f3f4f2f4a893fdccc2a4373

view the ALGO tx on explorer.perawallet.app: LCEKJP57B4TMZNPB7GBYQAPW5MI24AGA7MZ2HPS5HX7EOLGNJ2HA

Wednesday October 29, 2025

NGC 7000 North America Nebula

This is a large mosaic shot on my Seestar S30 in October and November 2025, totalling nearly 7 hours of data. Since then, a new set of processing scripts for Siril have been released from VeraLux. Their HyperMetric stretch and other scripts made processing this image much more pleasant and easy than when I first processed it a few months ago. You can see the full size image on my AstroBin.

11:27AM Thursday January 29, 2026

Anna's Hummingbird

11:27AM Thursday January 29, 2026

Anna's Hummingbird

11:27AM Thursday January 29, 2026

Anna's Hummingbird

11:27AM Thursday January 29, 2026

Anna's Hummingbird

11:27AM Thursday January 29, 2026

Anna's Hummingbird

11:27AM Thursday January 29, 2026

Anna's Hummingbird

11:48AM Thursday January 29, 2026

Monday February 02, 2026

M 33 Triangulum Galaxy

I shot this on the new Dwarf Mini over three nights starting Feb. 2nd, totalling 417x30s = 3.48 hours of data. I was never able to manage 30s exposures in equatorial mode on the Seestar S30, but I had no trouble using 30s exposures on the Dwarf Mini. This was also processed with VeraLux scripts in Siril. You can see the full size image on my AstroBin.

1:45PM Tuesday February 03, 2026

American Pipit

2:08PM Tuesday February 03, 2026

American White Pelican