About
Measure the Pixels documents the building of an AI astrophotographer. The star of the show is NOVA — an autonomous processing engine that takes raw telescope data from a SeeStar S50 and does everything a human astrophotographer would: stacking, gradient removal, colour calibration, deconvolution, stretching, and honest self-grading. It explains every decision with the numbers that drove it.
The human behind it is Henry — the builder. He writes the code (with AI pair programmers), points the telescope, and owns the final say. NOVA processes; Henry engineers.
The philosophy
Every decision follows one loop: measure → try → measure → adjust. No step is accepted because it "looks right" — the pixels are measured before and after, guards veto artifacts that fool the metrics, and every pipeline change is versioned with the evidence that justified it (see the changelog).
Run it yourself
The full production code is open source. There is no installer — on purpose. Clone the repo, open it with an AI coding agent, and say: "read REPLICATE.md and set this up for my system."