Testing Non-Astro Image Stacking with Drizzle

For astrophotography, an essential technique is image "stacking" where the image data from many many single images is combined to create a much more bright, detailed, and less noisy final image. This is used with many long exposures of nebulae, galaxies, etc, or with many thousands of video frames of planets or the Moon.

It's also common to apply the "drizzle" algorithm to use all the extra data from those many stacked frames to actually increase the pixel count of the final image. By enlarging each source image by 3x in both horizontally and vertically, and applying some math while stacking those images, more pixel data can be extracted from the source.

I was curious how well this stacking with drizzle technique would work for a non-astro photo subject. It turns out it worked quite well!

50 Wordles in 50 Days

Yesterday I completed my 50th Wordle puzzle. Since I had successfully completed all 50 Wordles I'd ever attempted, I figured it was a good stopping point. So long, Wordle. It's been a treat.

February 16th 2022 Full Moon Image Quality Data

I shot 67 photos of the full moon on February 16th with my Canon EOS R6. I tried shooting with a few different apertures (shooting in aperture priority mode) and processed all the images with PIPP, AutoStakkert! 3, and RegiStax 6.

I processed all the images in one batch with PIPP, which allowed me to see PIPP's "quality" rating for all the photos relative to each other. I was curious to see which camera settings resulted in the highest quality rating from PIPP, so I assembled all the photo settings into the table below.

Smooth Colors and Slope Shading for the Mandelbrot set

Now at version 0.8.0, Very Plotter can render the Mandelbrot set with smooth colors and slope shading. In this article we'll look at how these features were added (relatively easily!).

2022 Winter Olympics: Countries Ranked by Athletes per 100k Residents

While watching the opening ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympics, I wondered which countries sent the most athletes to the games relative to their population. After some light massaging of Wikipedia data, I have my answer.

Of countries having sent 10 or more athletes, the top 10 in order by athletes per 100k residents, are: Latvia, Slovenia, Estonia, Switzerland, Finland, Norway, Austria, Sweden, Czech Republic, and Denmark.

These countries are also the only countries having sent 10 or more athletes with 1 or more athletes per 100k residents.

The full list is below.