u/glennbech

I've been working on my cloud based storage & stacker for Seestar. I'm finally confident to let people in without an invite code.

The premise is that you upload your Seestar lights into a collection. Pancakestack will plate-solve, thumbnail, analyze and catalog every image. You can then filter, clean up, and then stack your images.

I know this hobby is dominated by stacking on own hardware- but I think there is a wedge here for people like me who would like to my projects everywhere, and that doesn't want to buy hardware able to stack large datasets in reasonable amount of time.

Some cloud stacking benefit- ; bored at a dinner party? Re-stack a subset of your M101 data with 2x drizzle. Start four jobs at the same time with different parameters and compare the results. Stack from the grocery store, stack from the couch. Don't be scared of your external HDD dying on you.

I've built some really cool, but experimental features. Here is the "Panalyzer" - where you can see how each frame fits in to the stack, with regards to orientation and position- for example if you're building a mosaic

https://preview.redd.it/vpyyuxfqs7kh1.png?width=2934&format=png&auto=webp&s=b45ff224020dd54f73ef672381dbd6da19dce409

But most importantly for me, I can run really large stacks in a reasonable amount of time, without burning up my Macbook Pro M1 from 2021. I have tested with 1800 Seestar S30 P images, 2x drizzle, The job takes 1:40:00 ish

A non drizzle 500 image stack takes less than 10 minutes, usually six or seven. The stacking is done by really powerful cloud servers, think 32 cpu cores, 128 gb memory and up.

I can not of course, sustainably provide this for free, and there is an economic incentive here, Im not going to hide that - but I have a free plan with 10GB of storage and 1000 storage credits/month (1 frame = 1 credit)

Now the question .. Is there enough of a market of Seestars users that want to stack outside of the box itself, that doesn't want to invest in the hardware, and still enjoy he convenience and safety of having everything available for stacking and a backed up?

it's at pancakestack.net btw :-) It's also some other tools there. Sky map I built over the summer holiday while the family watched Netflix- and a FITS preview/share tool. Upload a FITS file, get a web-page with a preview and a shareable link.

Hey,

Quick question. Is there a cloud based Astro photo stacking solution available. Something like ->

1- I upload my FITS as an archive
2 - Siril or other software runs on cloud servers, performs the stack
3 - You download the stacked image,

I mostly process on my Macbook Pro, which is Also my main working computer. It's not ideal to have Siril running in the background for 4-5 hours at a time eating up all my resources...

I don't know of any service like this, anyone has?

Hey!

I'm shooting NGC 7000 from Spain - more or less the only target that I have access to over the rooftops that can be imaged all night. This is 480 x 20 seconds. I think there are about 15-20 60 seconds in the stack as well.

Siril, naztronomy script. RC-tools, GraXpert and soft touches in Photoshop. Best far with the S30P so far!

https://preview.redd.it/og9t2vt932fh1.jpg?width=3617&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=081c60fd96781337fed0928752bb2da9439bab9c

Hey!

I'm a software engineer - and just got my S30P- capturing the NGC 7000 from Spain as we speak!

I felt that firing up the Seestar app to frame and plan what to shoot was but cumbersome, Stellarium is good- but you have to add the Seestar sensors and scope info to test how you'd frame a DSO for example. Also you can't compare the different Seestar models, which I wanted

So I burned the midnight oil and made this one - it's a prototype hosted on Netlify- I'll probably make a proper domain name for it after holidays.

I added a meteorology API to check cloud cover- and the app calculates astronomical dusk, dawn and so on based on GPS

I've loaded in the Messier , LDN, LBN and Caldwell + Sharpless catalogs. All searchable. Open to suggestions, bug reports and feature requests

Have a look and let me what you think

https://preview.redd.it/2j3x7hwezneh1.png?width=1658&format=png&auto=webp&s=bd8b76e873a40102b293bb49d56e2ded26aaa9c9

If people are interested I can share the URL. If I do that in this post, It will be spam filtered for sure! :-)

Work-in-progress Dub Techno track made on the M8 based on the tutorial by EZBOT on youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53fTQCZSjZ4&t=7141s

A lot of work in here- but I have all summer- at least 3 more weeks of downtime :)

I've been posting no and then to this subreddit and its siblings about various aspects of developing my SAAS- and also trying to promote it by posting in-context content to relevant subreddits where it would benefit.

For a couple of weeks, I saw tons of referrals from reddit.com, and I had 10-15 new signups daily, for almost two weeks- boosting my user count to nearly 600

I am building an audio sharing platform - the problem? Only about 1/3 of signed-up users in the last 30 days actually uploaded or shared a file. So 2/3 users are actually "tourists".

Now - since I'm not posting as much , new user count is crashing, going back to 2-4 per day.

I should have guessed that something was "off" since my "usage metrics" - like uploaded files, playbacks, and platform engagement metrics - was more or less flat during this user upturn.

So! Just a word of warning. If you enthusiastically post about your product here, and it's sibling subreddits- and experience a blossom in users- don't be blinded - and think you're "taken off" - Find the "truth" - metrics, that involve actual user engagement in your product to look at and focus on that- instead of look at the user number!

Anyone else experienced something similar?

I had a lot of fun making this. 100% in the box on Syntakt. Very inspiring box I must say!

https://reddit.com/link/1uep6uo/video/4zuivxheka9h1/player

https://pastewaves.com/player/af1b9921-aa44-4933-8ebb-44282fdec427

https://preview.redd.it/vh93toh8yp8h1.jpg?width=1400&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=44d235cc024e092cefd62f92daff80a4d597a699

https://pastewaves.com/player/12cadb5d-b5d5-4cbb-bf7c-1707b576b527

For a side project today - vibe coded mainly but something solid that you’d expect real revenue from.. something that scales and somewhere you dare put in your stripe key and google web client secret

How much would you charge spect to pay for hosting - initially with zero customers ? And where would you host it ?

I’m surveying the market :-)

For a side project today - vibe coded mainly but something solid that you’d expect real revenue from.. something that scales and somewhere you dare put in your stripe key and google web client secret

How much would you charge spect to pay for hosting - initially with zero customers ? And where would you host it ?

I’m surveying the market :-)

https://preview.redd.it/m5aotggeub8h1.jpg?width=1400&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2e5be88859477e6b4333cf4476321b4c2540de6d

I heard Iron Maiden's "The loneliness of the long distance runner" - and All of a sudden I felt the urge to make "The loneliness of the Solo SAAS founder" exist. Had a lot of fun making this, mostly back- and forth with ChaptGPT on song structure and lyrics.

Working this way, I find myself coming up with the best ideas- but the AI reins things in and keep the song coherent to genre structure and so on. Also it can brainstorm some creative wild stuff from time to time. But it would never have come up with "We commit to main, we have the balls" :)

https://pastewaves.com/player/73333230-1c47-468a-af3e-9b5bb955d617

I've been postponing the sales tax question for as long as possible - knowing I'd had to tackle it sooner or later. For me it seems that Stripe Tax is both not only complicated (even if they help registering with foreign tax authorities) - but also expensive for a small SAAS. The lowest tier is $100 and 1000 transactions/month.

Is Stripe actually viable for SAAS at all or are LemonSqeezy and the others that handle it all the place to go eventually? Or do you just use Stripe, close your eyes and hope for the best?

For my SAAS, I have chosen to navigate around the big players in user tracking, and are bascially hand-rolling a lot of own metrics using AWS CloudWatch metrics.

https://pastewaves.com is a free to use audio clip sharing platform with a premium upgrade option for persistent file storage. 100% anonymous files expire in 7 days, if you log in- I keep files for 14.

In the image below you can see one of my custom widgets - it's an "expiry wave" I can see how many files - both for anonymous users, and authenticated ones. If I see a huge block of files from authenticated usrs about to expire - I basically hope for conversion.

https://preview.redd.it/978z3tdrjv7h1.png?width=2398&format=png&auto=webp&s=f586ba486932d5d776eb05803197c1688aeb10d9

I'm also very happy with my user capture visualisation - what I do, is that I keep track of files that users upload anonymously, and after the upload I offer them to sign in, and associate the files they uploaded after-the-fact with their account- no re-upload.

https://preview.redd.it/wn1152vakv7h1.png?width=2484&format=png&auto=webp&s=8371cc4b6f7c7d33dce61750560bbe31227a81e1

This mechanism alone converts 4% of all anonymous users to signed-in ones. Once signed in I can send them warnings that their files is about to expire, another conversion point.

Lastly I have a stacked chart for user types- The top layer is a consant pool of beta users I cannot convert. They're early adopters the grandfathered in to the full package free of charge. The middle tier is paid users, which is at 11 now. And the bottom is my convertible pool of free users.

https://preview.redd.it/yq3360zukv7h1.png?width=2276&format=png&auto=webp&s=95c66ace2b24a2eaefe9c45da26acc162d01579b

I have an Admin API that collect most of these metrics and populate a DB every 5 minutes, the front-end just visualises what's in there.

By rolling my own I can make very specific visuals- but what do you think? Is it worth it? What do you use to visualise user behaviour and KPIs ?