Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander sits in the company's clean room
Firefly Aerospace announced this morning that its Blue Ghost lunar lander "aced" environmental testing and that the company is preparing to send the spacecraft to Cape Canaveral ahead of a mid-January launch fireflyspace.com/news/firefly...
Bluesky now has over 10 million users, and I was #446!
NASA’s Spitzer, TESS Find Potentially Volcano-Covered Earth-Size World www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/nas...
Images From NASA’s Perseverance May Show Record of Wild Martian River www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/images-from-nasas-p... via @NASAJPL
Webb Looks for Fomalhaut’s Asteroid Belt and Finds Much More www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/webb-looks-for-foma... via @NASAJPL
New Study of Uranus’ Large Moons Shows 4 May Hold Water www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/new-study-of-uranus... via @NASAJPL
Is a runaway black hole creating a trail of stars?
https://youtu.be/UYVUPd3_Fus
And also generating some original content with this William Optics setup when clear skies permit ;) But yes this account is indeed work in progress figuring out how to get more of the community involved so reposting is one way.
This release features a composite image of 30 Doradus, otherwise known as the Tarantula Nebula, a region of active star formation in a neighboring galaxy. In the image, royal blue and purple gas clouds interact with red and orange gas clouds. Specks of light and large gleaming stars peek through the colourful clouds. The patches of royal blue and purple gas clouds represent X-ray data collected by the Chandra Observatory. The brightest and most prominent blue cloud appears at the center of the image, roughly shaped like an upward pointing triangle. Darker X-ray clouds can be found near the right and left edges of the image. The red and orange gas clouds represent infrared data from the James Webb Space Telescope. These patches resemble clouds of roiling fire. The brightest and most prominent infrared cloud appears at our upper left, roughly shaped like a downward pointing triangle. Wispy white clouds outline the upward pointing bright blue triangle in the center of the image.
[tentative serious skeet]
How about this stunning Tarantula Nebula composite image, produced by JWST and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. About 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
X-ray: NASA/CXC/Penn State Univ./L. Townsley et al.
IR: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/JWST ERO Production Team
via NASA: Ferocious stellar winds, likely from the bright blue star at the top of the image, are blowing through a curtain of dust. The fine dust scatters the starlight at blue wavelengths. Farther down, another bright, super-hot star shines through filaments of obscuring dust, looking like the Sun shining through scattered clouds. A diagonal string of fainter accompanying stars looks reddish because dust is filtering starlight, allowing more of the red light to get through. The bottom of the picture presents a keyhole peek deep into the dark nebula. Hubble captures the reddish glow of ionized hydrogen. It looks like a fireworks finale, with several overlapping events. This is caused by pencil-thin jets shooting out from newly forming stars outside the frame of view. These stars are surrounded by circumstellar disks, which may eventually produce planetary systems, and powerful magnetic fields that direct two parallel beams of hot gas deep into space.
The Hubble Space Telescope turned 33 years old last week – it launched April 24, 1990.
The 2023 Hubble anniversary image is the nebula NGC 1333, a star forming region about 970 light years away in the constellation Perseus.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, STScI
👋🏼 Hello there! Tony DiBernardo here.
🚀 I teach people about space online.
👩🏽🚀 Just filmed an analog documentary
Looking for other space enthusiasts and professionals to follow!
Please do!!! The community needs them.
30°N a bit more to the East in Austin TX here. What's the next target you would like to take a photo of?
Roger that, I'll try PixInsight next time when I process my photos, I just need to find some time to learn it. Are you in the Northern Hemisphere?
You are very welcome, that's a cool photo! There is plenty of space for space here ;)
Hello from planet Earth!
Good night friends!
gm ☕️
Neat! Big fan of William Optics as well.
Nice! I'm mainly using Photoshop to process mine. What telescope did you use to take this photo?
Two tile black and shit image showing a small fuzzy dot that is circled and annotated with the pulsar name. In the background is a large, chunky, edge on spiral galaxy
Another system in my remit is PSR J0614-3329, which is also a binary system.
I really like this pic of the white dwarf companion (pulsar is too small to resolve at ~20km diameter) … but look at the size of that edge on spiral galaxy in the background!
📸 Bassa et al. 2016 & Testa et al. 2015
Pulsar profile showing flux vs time. The profile is a narrow sharp peak.
Pulsar profile in intensity vs time. It shows a bright yellow line in the centre vs a background of orange static.
Am looking at a few millisecond pulsars for my PhD. This is my fav - PSR J1713+0747. The problem child.
It threw a tantrum in 2021 and I’m going to figure out why this 8.9 billion year old thing did so.
OR maybe it’s thrown its toys out of the pram in the past but we’ve not been here to see it!
What application do you use to post process the photos?
Some photons I caught in the photon trap on my driveway back in Winter
(California Nebula in narrowband filter color combination.)
#astrophotography
Some space photons I caught on my driveway recently.
Flaming Star nebula in Auriga #astrophotography
Image-filling space nebula with complex shapes, in a purple color palette.
Some photons I caught on my driveway last year!
The Lagoon Nebula in Sagittarius. #astrophotography
The photo of the Moon processed for color to show different minerals.
127 frames + 5 dark frames. Lightroom + PIPP + AutoStakkert! + RegiStax + Photoshop.
There are approximately 200 billion trillion stars in the universe. Or, to put it another way, 200 sextillion.
That’s 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000!
The number is so big, it’s hard to imagine. But try this: It’s about 10 times the number of cups of water in all the oceans of Earth.
Fun show on building space habitats with Ariel Ekblaw:
https://youtu.be/RQFrUHoDaV0
