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They’re non exclusive and you can find them up for sale here: https://rpastro.darkroom.com/collections/as-seen-in-project-...

My website is also www.rpastro.com.au :)

Nice catch. I’m Brazilian but have been living in Australia for over 20 years and thank you!

Somewhat answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47520283

I’ve had multiple setups over the last 2 years, but for the images displayed in the movie there were two main setups: a William Optics RedCat 51 II and an Askar 130PHQ, both paired with a ZWO ASI2600MM Pro camera, typically on a Sky Watcher NEQ6 Pro mount, along with narrowband and RGB filters depending on the target.

Traditionally (pre-ai) you would use another image of the same part of the sky and negate the items that you want to remove from the image

As an example terrestrial telescope mirrors get dusty. You're not going to break down the scope just to clean up the dust as this is a many days operation in most cases. So instead you would take "flats" that were of a pure white background and thus showed the dust in its full, dusty, glory. When you take your actual images, you negate (subtract from the original image) the flat and thus any noise generated by the dust. You can use this same method for removing brighter stars from an image that would otherwise saturate the ccd and wash out the background. Turns out it doesn't work for planes. Ask me how I know!

>> I'm curious how the starless versions are created.

Its done with using dedicated astrophotography software (StarXTerminator). Example: https://astrobackyard.com/starnet-astrophotography/

So these are more artistic photo works than real science photos...

Rod Prazeres the Astrophotographer, has given this interview where he talks about the process: https://www.astronomy.com/observing/the-astrophotography-of-...

I feel like the stars are probably pretty easy to mask out since they’re very bright relative to the rest of the image. Once you have the mask, each one is small enough that you could probably fill it with the values from adjacent pixels. Kinda like sensor mapping to hide dead pixels. That’s just a guess though, I’m sure there’s more to it than that.

As a general rule, always read the book first. In this case, that holds true - there was too much in the book to cover completely in the movie. It's a pretty quick read as well - you could probably bang it out in a long afternoon, if you were inclined.

That said, I never read Harry Potter and can't imagine going back and reading it now. So, YMMV.

Both are wonderful. I thought the movie was an excellent adaptation of the book.

But I am glad I read the book first, I got much more out of it - it goes a lot more in depth into the science and engineering challenges that occur throughout. Which I appreciated. I'm not sure I would have read the book in the same way if I had seen the movie first.

I watched the movie and then read the book.

I tend to prefer movies as a storytelling medium, and enjoyed watching the story unfold that way. I ended up just wanting to know more about things that were implied in the movie but not explained, and the book filled in those gaps well.

So if you want to do both, and want to get something new when you do each, then, having done it that way, I would recommend it.

Edit: reviewing my app history, it took me somewhere between 10-11 hours to read the book, and I do not read fiction especially fast.

That’s a tough one. I’d recommend the book first, but I can see arguments for both orders.

By reading the book first, you’ll have a better background and understanding of the context of the plot, the science, and the overall objectives of the mission. There are also several “twists” in the book that were cut from the movie for runtime.

I enjoyed the movie after reading because I got to see the story “come to life”.

But I could also understand the perspective of enjoying the movie first, and then having the story/world expanded 8x with a 16hr book.

You’d could equate “movie -> book” order to watching the LoTR standard editions first, and then watching the extended editions.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by Ray Porter (on Audible) and would recommend that production if you enjoy audio.

I don’t think you can go wrong either way :)

I read the book before watching the movie - I'd recommend the opposite.

Watching the movie first will set the stage for a lot of details that work better in a book than a movie.

Book is better but they’re both good. I don’t think order matters.

The book is fantastic, I’d recommend reading it one way or another. ;) Speaking personally, I lose some motivation to read a book after seeing the movie. But book-based movies of course rarely if ever live up to the book. I read first, so I can’t speak to the other way around, but I think I was looking forward to the movie a lot more than I would have if I hadn’t read the book. I also suspect I was more forgiving of the movie than if I’d seen it cold.

Not the parent, but I've seen the movie and read the book. I think there are a few gaps in the movie that's explained by the book, but there are some artistic freedom as well between the book and the film.

I would recommend reading the book first at least.

> Would you recommend reading the book first?

I recommended it to a co-worker, who ended up going with the audio book, and found he found it good.

The audiobook version is amazing, if that’s your thing.

About to see the movie in two days, read the book ages ago and remember I wasn't too fond of the book ending either, so now I got a bit more excited :)

What changed about the ending?

That is not what starnet does. It just removes the star from the picture you took, nothing else. It also predates generative AI by a few years.

If by "not real", you mean "you removed the stars so it no longer reflect reality!", then real photograph doesn't exist. For example, OP uses narrow-band filters, and it's common to map H-alpha wavelength, which is red, to green in the images. Does that make it unreal?

In the end, astrophotography is more art than science; the goal is more about producing aesthetically-pleasing images than doing photometry. Photographers must take some artistic license.

They're a lot more real than CG/AI. It's very rare and maybe not even possible to have a "true" astrophotography photo. At those light levels, eyes and camera sensors work very differently and even a "plain" astro photo has either been processed a lot, or else doesn't look like what our eyes would see.