Astrophotography isn’t easy. Even with good equipment, simply snapping a picture of the night sky won’t produce anything particularly impressive. You’ll likely just get a black void with a few pinpricks of light for your troubles. It takes some editing magic to create stunning images of the cosmos, and luckily [Karl Perera] has a guide […]
Starting on June 12, 2025, the NASA Spot the Station website will no longer provide ISS sighting information, per a message recently sent out. This means no information on sighting opportunities provided on the website, nor will users subscribed via the website receive email or text notifications. Instead anyone interested in this kind of information […]
Have you heard that author Andy Weir has a new book coming out? Very exciting, we know, and according to a syndicated reading list for Summer 2025, it’s called The Last Algorithm, and it’s a tale of a programmer who discovers a dark and dangerous secret about artificial intelligence. If that seems a little out […]
Here’s one for our astronomy geeks. Our hacker [arrow] has made their own observatory! This particular video is a bit over ten minutes long and is basically a montage; there is no narration or explanation given, but you can watch clear progress being made and the ultimate success of the backyard facility. Obviously the coolest […]
Some hacks are so great that when you die you receive the rare honor of both an obituary in the New York Times and an in memoriam article at Hackaday. The recently deceased, Ed Smylie, was a NASA engineer leading the effort to save the crew of Apollo 13 with a makeshift gas conduit made […]
As with all aging bodies, clogged tubes form an increasing issue. So too with the 47-year old Voyager 1 spacecraft and its hydrazine thrusters. Over the decades silicon dioxide from an aging rubber diaphragm in the fuel tank has been depositing on the inside of fuel tubes. By switching between primary, backup and trajectory thrusters […]
You normally think of ELINT — Electronic Intelligence — as something done in secret by shadowy three-letter agencies or the military. The term usually means gathering intelligence from signals that don’t contain speech (since that’s COMINT). But [Nukes] was looking at public data from NASA’s SMAP satellite and made an interesting discovery. Despite the satellite’s […]
A group of students from Lancing College in the UK have sent in their Critical Design Review (CDR) for their entry in the UK CanSat project. Per the competition guidelines the UK CanSat project challenges students aged 14 to 19 years of age to build a satellite which can relay telemetry data about atmospheric conditions […]
Telescopes are great tools for observing the heavens, or even surrounding landscapes if you have the right vantage point. You don’t have to be a professional to build one though; you can make all kinds of telescopes as an amateur, as this guide from the Springfield Telesfcope Makers demonstrates. The guide is remarkably deep and […]
One of the first things that an amateur radio operator is likely to do once receiving their license is grab a dual-band handheld and try to make contacts with a local repeater. After the initial contacts, though, many hams move on to more technically challenging aspects of the hobby. One of those being activating space-based […]