- The Deep Sky Collective presents: M31 - the kilohour project and the quest for Oiii (app.astrobin.com)
After half a year of work, the Deep Sky Collective is happy to present its latest project - a kilo hour on M31. Not only does this image set new boundaries of what’s possible with collaborative imaging, its release also marks the DSC’s anniversary project! Being launched the 13rd February last year, we never thought we could achieve what we did so far - huge thanks to everyone involved in the DSC and for keeping on believing in what we do.
- The Intel 8088 processor’s instruction prefetch circuitry: a look inside (righto.com)
In 1979, Intel introduced the 8088 microprocessor, a variant of the 16-bit 8086 processor. IBM’s decision to use the 8088 processor in the IBM PC (1981) was a critical point in computer history, leading to the dominance of the x86 architecture that continues to the present.1 One way that the 8086 and 8088 increased performance was by prefetching: the processor fetches instructions from memory before they are needed, so the processor can execute them without waiting on the relatively slow memory. I’ve been reverse-engineering the 8088 from die photos and this blog post discusses what I’ve uncovered about the prefetch circuitry.
- Andromeda Galaxy (Wikipedia)
The Andromeda Galaxy is a barred spiral galaxy and is the nearest major galaxy to the Milky Way. It was originally named the Andromeda Nebula and is cataloged as Messier 31, M31, and NGC 224. Andromeda has a diameter of about 46.56 kiloparsecs (152,000 light-years) and is approximately 765 kpc (2.5 million light-years) from Earth. The galaxy’s name stems from the area of Earth’s sky in which it appears, the constellation of Andromeda, which itself is named after the princess who was the wife of Perseus in Greek mythology.