I'm starting to feel like I don't actually know how to get myself to stay focused in way that's sustainable and healthy.
I definitely feel like I could be productive right now, but I don't know how to work with my brain instead of simply beating it into submission with negative emotions.
Like, when people suggest using urgency to make tasks more interesting, I'm pretty sure they don't mean creating urgency by telling yourself "if you don't get this done today, you're dumb and a failure" over and over again in your head.
I don't know how to instill a sense of urgency in a way that is believable to my brain. It's not urgent if I need to lie to myself about how urgent it is. It kind of demonstrates the opposite, actually.
Trying to convince myself with logic that a task is important or urgent usually ends up coming down to "do The Thing, because <bad consequence> will happen if you don't", which just activates my anxiety and gradually evolves the task into a claustrophobic threat.
Focusing on a positive reward doesn't help because the reward just turns into the thing that will be taken from me if I fail. Telling myself I'll get a treat becomes "do The Thing or the treat will be taken from you."
Having a job has always felt more like a threat than an opportunity to me. Especially as I've been getting paid more over time, and the implied increase in responsibility that goes along with that.
The more successful I've been, the more I start to panic that I'm going to fuck it up and lose it all.
Claustrophobia is an apt analogy to how it feels. I've increasingly felt trapped by my job — by the entire concept of having "a job". Especially since transitioning, because so much of who I am is now dependent upon lifelong healthcare access, which in the US basically means you must be employed.
The fact that it claimed to be "AI-powered" made me extremely skeptical of BlurXterminator, but now that I understand how this tool works on a technical level, I'm sold.
The guy probably just wrote some code to generate randomly varying point spread functions, made a training data set by filtering a set of known images with the PSFs, and then training a neural net on the data. It's not a trivial task, but it's also not insanely difficult.
Like, the tool was made by one guy (I think?), so it can't be too difficult. It's more that most people don't have the technical skills to do it. I probably could (given sufficient time, which is the rub).
I wonder if there's a calibration method to determine the PSF of your optical system. Like, in the same way that you take bias, dark, and flat frames to calibrate, there might be a different set of images you could take to get the PSF. 🤔
Initial instinct is to make a cover for the telescope with a hole that's smaller than the spatial resolution of your telescope and shine a light through it to make a point. That's probably harder than it sounds, and it only measures the PSF at a single point. There's probably a more intelligent and mathy method to get the PSF across the entire focal plane through. More research needed.
@thomasfuchs True, but that's probably a lot easier to estimate than whatever the diffraction PSF is for your telescope. Especially if it's a particularly weird one. I don't know. It's still an interesting thing to look into, regardless.
@thomasfuchs I'm shopping for a new camera and I learned that the ASI294MM Pro has a special "unlocked" Bin1 mode to get higher resolution (8288x5644 vs 4144x2822 in Bin2). That kind of confused me at first because they list a lot of the specs in the Bin2 mode. I was wondering whether the images I've seen from you are in the Bin1 or Bin2 mode?
I became much more interested in the ASI294MM once I learned it has smol 2.3 micron pixels 🤏🏻. I understand now why you get so much detail on your images.
@thomasfuchs That's what I figured. It's a good way to compensate for the wide field of the Red Cat 51. That's why I got the ASI178MM that I've been using, which has a similar pixel size.
@thomasfuchs Okay, good to know. My ASI178 also has some obnoxious amp glow, so I know your pain. Like you say though, a good set of darks fixes it. I suspect that's a bit easier with a cooled camera.