I made this Cinnamoroll Plush for my daughter. I mostly followed this pattern for the main body.

Instead of using felt for the eyes/mouth/blush spots I wanted to crochet them on. For the eyes and blush spots I followed a generic oval pattern

Mouth

For the mouth I did a simple chain. I left a long tail on the initial slip knot, did a ch 20 and left a long tail on the end. I used each tail to place the mouth then did some stitches to create the shape.

Eyes

I followed the generic oval pattern with an initial chain of 6

Blush Spots

I followed the generic oval pattern with an initial chain of 4

This is a modification to the previous pattern https://pipplo.com/deadmau5-crochet/

I wasn't happy with attaching the separately. I couldn't get quite the right shape and it stuck out too much for my liking. So I spent some time working out a pattern using color changes to stitch the mouth directly into the head for a flush look.

Materials

• 3.5mm Hook
• Medium weight yarn
• Yarn needle
• Polyfil stuffing

Abbreviations

SC - Single Crochet

HDC - Half Double Crochet

INC - Increase Stitch

Head

Crochet the the 12 row sphere pattern from the Ideal Crochet Sphere Pattern. But with the modified rounds 3-6 below.

I used the following video to help with the color changes

Round 1: SC 6 in a magic circle (6)

Round 2: INC in each stitch around (12)

Round 3: [1, INC , 2, INC ] - [1, INC ] - [2, INC , 1, INC ] (17)

1. Color A: 1, INC , 2, INC (7)
2. Color B: 1, INC (3)
3. Color A: 2, INC , 1, INC (7)

Round 4: [2, INC, 3] INC [3] INC [3, inc, 2] (21)Color A: 2, INC, 3, (First stitch in INC) (8)

1. Color B: (Second stitch in INC), 3, (First stitch in INC) (5)
2. Color A: (Second stitch in INC), 3, INC, 2 (8)

Round 5: [3, INC, 3] - [3, INC, 3] - [3, INC, 3] (24)

1. Color A: 3, INC, 3 (8)
2. Color B: 3, INC, 3 (8)
3. Color A: 3, INC, 3 (8)

Round 6: [8] [2, INC, 5] [8] (25)

1. Color A: 8 SC (8)
2. Color B: 2 SC, INC, 5 SC (9)
3. Color A: 8 SC (8)

Round 7: [7 SC] - [11 SC] - [7 SC]

1. Color A: 7 SC (7)
2. Color B: 11 SC (11)
3. Color A: 7 SC (7)

Round 8: 13, DEC, 10 (24)

Round 9: 3, DEC, 6, DEC, 6, DEC, 3 (21)

Round 10: 2, DEC, 3, DEC, 3, DEC, 3, DEC, 2 (17)

Round 11: DEC, 1, DEC, 2, DEC, 1, dec, 2, DEC, 1 (12)

Round 12: 4 scdec fasten off and weave end in to close

Ears (Make 4)

• SC 6 in a magic circle (6)
• 2 HDC in each (12)
• 2 INC in each (24)
• Fasten off and leave a long tail for sewing

Put two ears together and sew together. I use the tail from one ear to sew to the other. Then I use the other tail to sew to the head.

Eyes (Make 2)

• 6 SC in a magic circle (6)
• (SC, INC, SC)*2 (8)
• Finish off and leave a tail for sewing

Assembly

Pin the eyes and ears to the head and stitch on

Use some embroidery thread to add some Xs to the eyes (Optional)

Deadmau5 - Flush Mouth

This is a modification to the previous pattern https://pipplo.com/deadmau5-crochet/ I wasn’t happy with attaching the separately. I couldn’t get quite the right shape and it stuck out too much for my liking. So I spent some time working out a pattern using color changes to stitch the

thoughtfully inanepipplo

I wanted to crochet myself a Deadmau5 keychain amigurumi, but there are very few patterns online. This is the only one I was really able to find at the time:

Deadmau5 Keychain Amigurumi Crochet Pattern

I followed this but there were a few things I needed to change. For instance, the ears seemed off or too complicated for me. I was struggling to get a good look from them. So I worked out an alternatives for the ears.

I also don't tend to like felt on amigurumi so I wanted to crochet a mouth instead. I took a few attempts to find the right proportions, but I ended up referencing a pattern from here.

Pattern

Materials

• 3.5mm Hook
• Medium weight yarn
• Yarn needle
• Polyfil stuffing

Abbreviations

SC - Single Crochet

HDC - Half Double Crochet

INC - Increase Stitch

Head

Straight from the nerdigurumi.com pattern, use the 12 row sphere from the Ideal Crochet Sphere Pattern thanks to Ms. Premise-Conclusion

Crochet the complete sphere stuffing tight

Ears (Make 4)

• SC 6 in a magic circle (6)
• 2 HDC in each (12)
• 2 INC in each (24)
• Fasten off and leave a long tail for sewing

Put two ears together and sew together. I use the tail from one ear to sew to the other. Then I use the other tail to sew to the head.

Mouth

• SC 6 in a magic circle
• CH1, turn, INC, SC, INC, SC, INC (9)*
• CH1, turn, INC, 2 SC, INC, 2 SC (12)*
• CH1, turn, INC, 3 SC, INC, 3SC, INC, 2 SC (15)*
• Finish off and leave a tail for sewing

*Note that when chaining INC in the second stitch as the CH1 will end up as another stitch

Eyes (Make 2)

• 6 SC in a magic circle (6)
• (SC, INC, SC)*2 (8)
• Finish off and leave a tail for sewing

Round Top was only my second 10k peak summit attempt (my first attempt being the nearby Red Lake peak). At Red Lake we were never able to get GPS over 10k ft for some reason. I think we didn’t find the true summit after searching around for a while, but it was close enough for me. So, in anticipation of an upcoming hike to Cottonwood lakes and Langley summit, I organized a little group hike to Round Top to get some practice in.

There are multiple routes to summit Round Top, but we started at the Carson Pass trailhead for an 8 mi out and back. (see the map here)

The first few miles are a nice pleasant stroll without much elevation change. The trail is clearly defined and easy to follow. Coming in and out of tree coverage you can get some amazing views of the peak pretty quickly! It looks dauntingly far!

After about 2.5 miles you’ll hit the lake just before the elevation gain begins. It sits right at the base of the peak, and you can see the final ascent path. This is a good spot to stop and rest a bit, refill water bottles, and mentally prepare for the climb.

The trail starts off doing some gradual switch backs, slowly working it’s way up to a somewhat sandy long vertical ascent.This is just about half way up the slope. There is still a defined trail but you have to keep your eyes open for it, and also keep an eye out for slippery slopes.

The view looking back is quite majestic. There was a bad haze in the background since we were still in fire season I can imagine how much better these views would be on a clear day.

This trail ends at some small bouldering

One last bit of scrambling to the peak!

Update: After summiting Langley, and I have to say that while I thought “Boy Red Lake was a cake walk compared to Round Top”. Looking back, both of these are nothing compared to 14k elevations yikes!

Winter has returned, and with it, a chance to look back on the progress I made this year. M42 was one of my very first attempts at astrophotography!

This week I was able to capture 57 minutes of exposure with the telescope, thats a huge increase over January’s 34 seconds! I’m getting a lot better at setup/alignment, etc and the cool weather has significantly reduced the noise in the images. I’ll need to have a cooled camera for summer!

You might remember this shot from January:

Telescope: At72ed

Camera: Canon 70D

Mount: Celestron AVX

57x60s exposure @ISO800

Tonight I decided to try something a little bit different. I show a wider field image with an 85mm lens instead of the telescope.

The coloring is very red, but I’m not sure how much is due to Light Pollution or not. There are definitely some dusty structures visible. I like the B&W version too.

Canon 70D – 28 shots @90s 800ISO

I wanted to share some of the different steps of the image taking process I used for M51. There are 4 different types of images taken to generate the single output image

• Lights: These are the photos of the galaxy as you would expect
• Darks: These are photos with the lens cap on. The goal here is to capture the noise of the camera sensor. They are the same length as the lights
• Bias: These are also with the lens cap on, but they are taken at the shortest exposure possible. The goal here is to find the minimum read noise of the camera sensor
• Flats: These are photos taken with a plain white illumination. These are intended to find what the vignetting of your lens looks like

All of the images below are stretched to exaggerate their effects and not well processed.

Lights Only

First we look at an image with just the lights. Here you can see a couple of things. There is a lot of vignetting around the edges and the center is brighter. Also there is a lot of noise if you zoom in closely

Lights Flats

Here you can see a stacking with just lights and the flats.

Hmm…this doesn’t look very good does it? You can see that it’s almost just inverted the image of just the lights.

You can also see two spots on the image now. I realized a little late that I took the flats before cleaning the lens, so the spots aren’t really there. Ignore those for now.

Lights + Flats + Bias

Now lets add in the bias images to the stacking process. Suddenly the image looks much flatter! The bias images remove some noise from the Lights and Flats and give a better final stacked output.

But what you see now is a ton of weird splotchiness and banding. That’s ugly 🙁

Lights + Flats + Bias + Darks

Ok now lets look at everything together! Now if you zoom in you can notice two things. The noisy streaks are a bit less pronounced, and the banding and other stuff is gone. The darks help to compensate for the predictable noise on the sensor, but there is still a little bit of streakiness due to the random noise. The best solution for that is probably cooling the sensor to remove noise!

I went out again and got another 40 minutes of exposure for M51. This time I was much more diligent about flats and darks.

I ended up stacking tonights data and the data from 5-28-16 to give ~80 minutes of integration time. DSS makes doing multi day stacks pretty easy as long as you’re saving all of your calibration frames and data!

40 extra minutes of integration only gave a little bit more detail, but it helped separate the signal from the background so it was a lot easier to add contrast between the sky and the target!

After seeing what 10 minutes of exposure could do I was really excited to get more. Tonight I decided to go for as long as I could get away with.

The top of my goals list were:

• Better alignment
• More Time
• Darks/Flats

I was able to get 40 minutes of exposure this time, because it took a bit longer than I had anticipated to do the alignment. I keep learning quirks and tricks. I think I will invest in some sort of cover for the mount so that I can leave it in place over the weekends if possible.

Anyway, after 40 minutes of exposure I came in and started stacking. This is when I learned the real difficult part of this hobby. Post Processing! It’s really hard for multiple reasons. One being that there is a lot software and options. PixInsight, Photoshop, Gradient Removal, Noise reduction, Histogram stretching. It’s pretty overwhelming to know what to start with. The second reason is that it’s very subjective! Every time I go back and tweak a photo I can’t decide which one is better! So I ended up with 10-15 different versions!

At this point I realized that I definitely need flats. So I started playing around with taking some flats.

And then after learning about flats I downloaded a demo of Pixinsight and started stumbling around that software. This is what I ended up with

I definitely came a long way, but it’s still hard to judge the subjective nature of editing. Should they be brighter and show nebulosity at the expense of a washed out background? What’s the best cropping? I dunno, but it’s fun seeing progress!

I finally got fed up with my home made barndoor tracker. It worked most of the time, but it was really sensitive to a lot of factors. One of which was the orientation of the camera. If the camera hung over the hinge the tracking was entirely at the wrong rate, and the hinge itself wasn’t strong enough to handle larger lenses.

I started down a path of fixing these issues but I realized “I don’t want to build trackers, I want to take photos.” One day I might get back to building a better tracker but for now I want to focus on the imagery.

I spent some time patrolling the cloudy nights forums for deals, and in the end I purchased a used Celestron AVX mount and an Astro-Tech AT72ed refractor.

Of course, as soon as the equipment arrived the California drought seemed to end and I was besieged by cloudy/rainy skies most nights for a few months.

Finally I was able to get a few clear nights and I got some practice aligning and taking photos with the mount. There were a lot of moving parts this first night. Backyard EOS, aligning the mount, focusing, etc. So my goal wasn’t a lot of light as much as exploring the equipment.

My first target was M51, the pinwheel galaxy:

In the end the tracking was ok, but the go-to calibration was way off. I ended up with M51 in the edge of the field of view which led to some distortion.

It was getting late by the time I got everything working, so I stuck with only 10 exposures. I just wanted some time to play around with editing, but 10 minutes of integration time is looking pretty good for a start!

• 10 x 60s @800ISO
• 20 Bias
• 10 Darks

Orion is finally back out and there was a break in the El Nino clouds, so I finally made an attempt to shoot the Orion Nebula (M42).

• Canon 6D
• 24-105mm F/4 @ 105mm F/5.6
• 17 2s Exposures @ 3200ISO
• No Darks or Flats

This was my first attempt at stacking so I decided to start off simple and do only light exposures. The light pollution in my back yard is horrible thanks to the Wal-Mart right around the corner so my expectations weren’t very high. I also didn’t even other with the tracker since the pollution makes it difficult to get longer exposures anyway.

This is a single light frame out of the camera:

As you can see it’s not very exciting, and I was starting to feel a little disappointed, but if you zoom in you can see there is some data there! Here is a crop of just the nebula

I tried stacking in Deep Sky Stacker, but all I get is a horrible result that I can’t seem to edit. I still need to figure out what i’m doing wrong

But I decided to try out stacking by hand in Photoshop again (like I did with Jupiter). After playing with levels and curves (I have no idea what I’m doing) I was able to get a pretty awesome result.

It was a tedious process stacking 17 light frames in photoshop, so I definitely need to figure out what the heck is wrong with DSS but I’m very happy with a first attempt here. I can’t wait to do more.

I recently painted a set of floating shelves from Ikea. I was definitely being lazy, but I didn’t want to deal with painting one side at a time while waiting for it to dry.

So for a quick hack I built myself a little mounting platform like below. I just cut a strip of wood a little less thick than the shelf and screwed it and the bracket to a ‘base’

This let me slide the shelf onto the mount vertically and then I could paint all sides of the shelf in one go. This made the whole process pretty easy!