Stripe Average Coloring

Very Plotter has been updated to version 0.9.0!

This release includes a few smaller nice things but the biggest new feature is Stripe Average Coloring (demonstrated in the image here).

Stripe Average Coloring is a completely different way to color the pixels of the Mandelbrot set than traditional iteration count coloring. It does a terrific job of adding beautiful detail to the areas that look empty, smooth, and featureless in iteration count images.

In this post we'll look at this coloring method and some example images created with it.

Cosmology Theory 2023

Papers published in February 2023 make the case for black holes potentially being the source of dark energy, where "dark energy" is the mysterious "force" responsible for the observed rapid expansion of the Universe. I will note right off the bat here that as of March 2023, Sean Carroll (and as he pointed out, the silence of other prominent physicists on this idea indicates they may share the same opinion) does not think this theory has a good chance of "being on the right track." With that being said, it's still fun to think about.

But if indeed black holes are the (only) source of dark energy, then, in the distant future, once all black holes evaporate, there may not be any influence of dark energy remaining in the Universe. At that point, the Universe may collapse.

Taking that possibility, and combining it with some other theories, chief among them being Roger Penrose's Conformal cyclic cosmology theory, creates a sensible overall theory for a cyclic Universe.

Orion Nebula and Siril

While I was out photographing comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) I also took some untracked shots of the Orion Nebula. I've never had any success in photographing a deep sky object before so I'm glad with how it turned out.

Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF)

When Comet NEOWISE was visible to the naked eye in July 2020, I went out to see it. I didn't own a nice camera then and only got a few terrible smartphone shots. Missing out on that opportunity helped motivate me to get a camera and lens. When I heard about this "green" comet I was excited to try to photograph it.

As luck would have it, after a few days of waiting, the clouds finally cleared. On a cold, perfectly clear night a few days ago (at the end of January) I was able to take some photos of comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF).

It was nice and high in the sky, and there weren't any clouds to deal with, but with the quarter moon shining brightly the comet was not visible even with binoculars. Some members from the local astronomy club were at the same location, with their telescopes, and they could barely see it.

I pointed my lens in the general direction of where the comet was. I took a 4-second exposure at ISO 2500, and the widest focal length I could... and there it was! On the little screen on the back of the camera I could see a faint green smudge around a small bright nucleus.

Programming in the era of ChatGPT

ChatGPT was released for free public use in November 2022 by OpenAI. I'd heard and read about how well it works not only as a chatbot, but for writing code.

While new for me, AIs writing code is not a new concept. GitHub Copilot (which I also haven't used) was released for public use more than a full year before ChatGPT. As I understand it, GitHub Copilot is built upon a similar sort of AI service, also from OpenAI, but is less generically conversational and more of a pure code-generation tool.

Asking an AI to write code, with a back-and-forth dialog, and actually have it generate something useful, seemed so far-fetched to me I had to try it out. As you'll see below, I was blown away by how well it performed!

With some back and forth fixing and incremental improvements (I hardly had to change anything myself) ChatGPT wrote several programs for me, and the following webpages:

• A fish emoji aquarium!!
• A haiku viewer page!!

In this article I'll share my chats with ChatGPT and most of the code it wrote for me. I close with my rambling thoughts on the onset of this technology.