2025-11-13

This long period of cloudy nights has sparked a new project for me. I have unfortunately hit a performance wall in org-roam that is sadly causing me to look to other sources for my notes and stargazing journals. I have attempted a few things to alleviate the issue, but with fifteen thousand notes or more in my libraries it was taking 10 seconds to perform a simple lookup to insert a link. Looking to other sources, I think I’m going to migrate my notes from org to markdown and use wiki-style linking (essentially the foundation of Obsidian). Without wanting to subscribe to Obsidian (or use the electron app) I can use the emacs or neovim libraries that perform the same functionality. This method does not require a database, but utilizes grep/ripgrep to find and link to notes. In initial tests, I was able to parse and insert links between notes without any delay with my current sizable libraries.

The biggest issue is that this method does not provide anything even close to org-agenda. But I’ve already been testing a way to parse the markdown files, format them into an ASCII table, and throw them into fzf. From my initial prototype, I think this will work well (and is blazing fast).

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Thankfully another opportunity to observe and with unbelievably warm weather for the middle of November! I only had to throw on a light sweatshirt for tonight.

6:26PM

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Lovely observation of M 103 tonight. The cluster was best framed at 110x, which still showed a little of the surrounding star field, but left enough of a gap to reveal its clustered appearance.

6:40PM

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What a cool cluster. At first glance it looked like a super bright edge on galaxy. When zooming in it looks like there are four (or maybe 5) bright stars forming a straight line. Very small in comparison to many other open clusters, but quite unique.