James Cameron spoke with us about programming for and operating a large telescope. The show is a blend of astronomy, engineering on the fly, and weird lady bug habitats.

The Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) is part of the Australian National University's Siding Spring Observatory in Coonabarabran, New South Wales, Australia.

The AAT has an all sky camera where you can check in on a very dark sky.

James was on Embedded Episode 172: Tell Forth You Me Please where we talked about the Forth programming language and his experiences with One Laptop Per Child.

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Unrelated to the AAT, Chris took this image of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) from his Zwo Seestar 50 over 9 hours (multiple days), stacking the images and processing the data.

Nathan Jones and Chris Svec give Chris and Elecia their 2025 performance review.

Donations went to Elevate Tutoring, an organization that provides funding and support to low-income and first-generation college students as well as free STEM tutoring for underserved schools. Embedded has already sent in the match to the donations for a total of over $5000.

Here is a list of all Embedded.fm episodes.

We mentioned the Foldscope, a small but mighty microscope. Also, mentioned was the book If I Only Changed the Software, Why is the Phone on Fire?

The show this week is sponsored by us. And you. Please consider supporting Embedded.fm on Ko-fi or Patreon. Or tell a friend about the show.

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Sophi Kravitz joined us to talk about art, science, and engineering.

You can see Messages from Space on Sophi's website /sophikravitz.com). A subset of the artwork had a short stay for a demo at Chabot Space & Science Center. The completed work will be shown in 2026. Sophi mentioned collaborating with two sonic environment artists Sofy Yuditskaya and Ria Rajan.

Geiger–Müller tube is an ionizing radiation detector. Cosmic rays move through space at nearly the speed of light, generally originating far away and long ago. You can also see them in a cloud chamber, like the one at San Francisco's Exploratorium. We also talked about using sculpting in Blender (there are many online video introductions).

Sophi does EE consulting and system quality checking at her company Greenlight.

The show this week is sponsored by us. And you. Please consider supporting Embedded.fm on Ko-fi or Patreon. Or tell a friend about the show.

Transcript