Experimenting with AI

Over the course of my career in technology, I gained an appreciation of the use of 'accelerators' — utilities, tools, and techniques that help get a task done more quickly than doing the same task by hand. Although I am retired now, I have various personal projects that involve some form of coding so accelerators are still useful. A new option that has really been a game-changer is ChatGPT. By describing the logic I need, it can sometimes provide complete, working code. At worst, it offers a foundation I can adapt, significantly cutting down the time it takes to create a new script or automation, especially in languages that I didn't use professionally like Python.

With the integration Microsoft has provided between ChatGPT 4 and DALL-E 3 under the covers of Copilot (previously Bing Chat), I decided to try my hand using it as an accelerator for creating images. For a few years now, I've had the idea of having a blog title image that highlighted the various interests I write about on this blog, primarily astronomy, photography and sailing: a nighttime seascape with a sailboat and the Milky Way arching overhead. As I have never received a response to my post seeking help from an artist, I decided to experiment with Copilot to create the image myself.

One thing I learned along the way is that creating with ChatGPT and DALL-E isn't like painting with a tool like Photoshop... there are limits to the degree of control you have. My original intent was to have the horizon centered in the image with a pretty plain foreground and limited detail at the top so that I could crop the standard DALL-E square image down to a landscape orientation. The initial images often placed the horizon lower or higher than specified, and revising the prompt didn't always affect its position in the final image. Similarly, I originally had specified having a single-masted sailboat yet every image generated had a two or three-masted ship. Anyway, it appears you have flexible about the details of the generated image.

After numerous passes, I started from scratch with the following prompt which didn't include a reference to a sailboat.

Create a photo-realistic image of a night-time  seascape with a calm sea with a large foreground of water and no land visible, with the stars across the sky an do the Milky Way rising high the the sky on the right side of the image, a low line of clouds along the horizon with a few small lightning bolts in the far distance and a full moon just above the horizon on the far left side of the image.

Of the 4 images generated, I chose the one that was closest to what I had in mind and provided a second prompt to add a small sailboat off in the distance, along the horizon. Here is the result.

This image came close to matching my original vision. The unexpected rocks under the water in the foreground were easily cropped out, although I left a few visible in the final version. Similarly, the Moon was up high instead of on the horizon but, again, not something I minded cropping out. Although the sailboat was a bit smaller than I'd like, I think it works well.

The one issue with this version is the reflection on the water in the middle. It's obviously not the Moon as that's at top right but it's not clear what it is a reflection of. The brightness on the horizon looks a bit like a sunset so perhaps it is supposed to be the Sun behind the clouds. I decided that I'm fine with the sky brightness but the reflection had to go.

Picking the image in Copilot opened it in Image Creator where I could pick Customize which opened the image in Microsoft Designer, an AI-powered design app. One of its features is 'generative erase'. Basically, all I had to do was select the reflection on the water with a brush and Designer replaced it by filling in that space with something that looked like everything around it. This is similar to the 'generative fill' feature in Photoshop. As you can see, it worked pretty well.

If you read the post linked above, you'll see that my ultimate goal was to have an image like this animated as a GIF. My research suggests that using existing AI tools for this is feasible, but it's not as straightforward as just giving ChatGPT a prompt. It involves creating and compiling a series of images, then employing tools like Stable Diffusion to convert them into a video, which can subsequently be saved as a GIF. It sounds like that could even involve writing code. Eventually, I may give that a try but, for now, I'm satisfied with just cropping this image down and using it as the blog title image for a while.

Your thoughts? Whether you love AI, hate it or are ambivalent, I'd like to hear about it in the comments.

As always, just click on an image to see it full screen!

October 14th Annular Eclipse as Viewed From Dallas

Did you get a chance to see the eclipse yesterday? Even though it was only a partial eclipse for us here in Dallas, Texas, it was still spectacular!

As lots of folks at the State Fair of Texas found, it's pretty amazing how easy it is to see what's going on (watching with appropriate eye protection, of course). Given that it isn't safe to look directly at the Sun and we may only even try during an eclipse, it's easy to forget that the Sun is about the same size in the sky as the Moon. That, of course, is why a total solar eclipse like the one next April is even possible. But it also means that putting on a pair of eclipse glasses and looking up yesterday during the eclipse, the piece of the Sun blocked out by the Moon was clearly obvious even without magnification. What about the view through a telescope? 

Here is a view from about an hour into the eclipse taken with my equipment which has an effective focal length of 714mm, resulting in a 12.38X view. At this level of magnification, besides the impact of the Moon being in the way you can also make out some of the many active sunspots. Click on the image to see full-size.

Seeing a point in time view of the eclipse is great but to show the changes over the course of the full eclipse, I put together this view containing a subset of all the images I shot to create the eclipse timelapse of my earlier post. These are each about a half-hour apart. 

When you click on this image to see it full-size, you'll also see another version labeled with the times throughout the eclipse when these were taken. 

A Solar Eclipse at the State Fair of Texas

While my equipment at home was running on automatic, capturing images for a timelapse of the solar eclipse today (see my last post), we were at Fair Park in Dallas for the State Fair of Texas. Our granddaughter, Harper, was showing one of her rabbits in the stock show. Rabbits have been her first breed to manage and show since joining FFA but this was our first opportunity to see Harper showing her bunnies. 

If you know anything about showing at a stock show, it's a lot of hurry-up-and-wait. It turned out that judging for Harper's group wasn't until late afternoon. With all that time free, I wandered around the fair grounds checking out the eclipse and checking out people checking out the eclipse. Thanks to groups like the Texas Astronomical Society of Dallas handing out eclipse glasses for free, lots of folks were watching it. And doing so safely!

Of course, it wouldn't have been a trip to the fair without having a Fletcher's corny dog and a funnel cake! Have you been to the fair, yet? There's still time!

Here are views from the day. As always, click on an image to see full-size. Enjoy!

Folks being safe watching the eclipse with
appropriate eye protection. 

Big Tex holding up the Sun

Big Tex and the solar eclipse viewed through
eclipse glasses

Crescent shadows from tree leaves adorn a
Fair Park coupon booth during mid-eclipse

Congrats to Harper and Coconut!