Testing a Dark Filter in the New Year
01/28/2026 -- bad skies, cold temperatures... so far only a few opportunities for imaging in December of '25 and January (so far) in '26... and tonight is not really much better. Giant moon, poor-ish skies... but took the opportunity to finally pull off the covers and test out a new totally dark filter (black) from Svbony that may aid in collecting dark and bias calibration frames at the end of a session. Installed the new black filter in the Xagyl 8-position filter wheel (now with position 1 == UV/IR, position 2 == dual narrow band (Ha/OIII) and finally position 3 == black). The Indi allsky backyard camera pseudo sky quality metric is grim (even in "moon mode") with a value over 37k at 22:31. Save a copy of the outdoor weather station JSON report at 22:20 and noted lovely conditions (to include light wind): "time": "2026-01-28T22:20:00-0500", "generator": "weewx 5.2.0" "temperature": {"value": 19....