Tuesday 18 October 2011

Orion Proximity


This is how a Nikon D60 can capture stars we can't see with the naked eye.

Also, this animation (actually only three photos, but tweened to appear as though they fade in and out) shows how at longer exposure lengths, more and more stars are revealed and captured as pixel data, though are not necessarily bright enough to register as a discernibly different value such that one can actually make them out; that is, the camera will have captured a very dim or distant star, but it will appear so faint in the image you might not even see it.

Unless, of course, you were to artificially increase exposure through editing of NEF data; the brightest (and noisiest) photo in this animation shows how increasing the exposure to 175% original whilst bumping up the black depth dramatically changes the depth and population of the starfield around Orion's belt, a well-documented and highly active nebula.

Wednesday 5 October 2011

Hi!

Hi, I’m Jimmy.

I’m a nerd. I collect computers and then run them all at once to search for prime numbers. So far I’ve found over a thousand.

I’m a musician. I collect instruments from around the world and teach myself to play them. I play eight. I suck at reading music and have only ever taken lessons in guitar. For fourteen years.

I’m a photographer. It started with my high school yearbook. In 2010, 75% of the pictures in there were mine. A photo sold at one of my exhibits now hangs in the office of the governor of Colorado.

I’m pansexual. And genderqueer. The world may not be ready for that, so I accept “bi” and “male.” I’m not changing my body anytime soon. The only reason I rarely tell people any of this is because it involves so much explanation.

I’m a gamer. I admit to playing OpenArena, Urban Terror, and the original Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein series voraciously. OA is my favorite. If I’m not the best on my team, I’m disappointed. I also have a bit of an addiction to solitaire.

I’m (still) a nerd. I run a distributed computing grid amongst all the computers I own and some I don’t. I participate in 32 scientific and math-based research projects. I’m currently ranked 808th out of 2,268,748 worldwide based on CPU time contributions.

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I’m shy. In person I’m very modest. I would never say most of this stuff in real life. Not because it’s exaggerated, made up, or that I’m ashamed of anything in particular. I just think I come across as an arrogant prick whenever I talk about myself. Am I actually? Doubt it. Lots of people don’t like me, but not for good (or any) reasons.
Honestly, if this was my biography, what would you think of me?