Earth setting behind the Moon. Shot by the Artemis II crew on April 6 2026. Just a slim blue-white crescent of our planet sliding down behind all those gray craters and rough lunar hills. Black space everywhere else. Reminds me of the Apollo 8 Earthrise. And makes you stop and stare.

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On Dec. 24, 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission, astronaut Bill Anders photographed Earth, giving us the iconic image dubbed Earthrise.

Two years later, #EarthDay was born to honor our home planet.

This image: Earthset from the Moon. Taken by Artemis II crew, April 6, 2026 🔭 🧪 ⚛️

#EarthDay2026

Earth Day 2026 | Theme, Activities, Events & Resources The theme for Earth Day 2026 is Our Power, Our Planet. Find out how to get involved now and on Earth Day, April 22, 2026.

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Let's take care of our Earth also by making sure that today's children become, in the future, better adults than we are.

Go to: www.earthday.org/earth-day-20...

🔭🧪⚛️ #EarthDay2026

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Nowadays more than ever, in the midst of the climate crisis, it's essential to review & rethink our relationship with Earth.

Crucial goals: sustainable development, environmental education, defense and promotion of nature according to this year's theme "Our Power, Our Planet".

🔭🧪⚛️ #EarthDay26

Earth setting behind the Moon. Shot by the Artemis II crew on April 6 2026. Just a slim blue-white crescent of our planet sliding down behind all those gray craters and rough lunar hills. Black space everywhere else. Reminds me of the Apollo 8 Earthrise. And makes you stop and stare.

1/3
On Dec. 24, 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission, astronaut Bill Anders photographed Earth, giving us the iconic image dubbed Earthrise.

Two years later, #EarthDay was born to honor our home planet.

This image: Earthset from the Moon. Taken by Artemis II crew, April 6, 2026 🔭 🧪 ⚛️

#EarthDay2026

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This fresh #Hubble image of the Trifid Nebula is something else. 🔭

Feels like diving into an underwater world but out in space. 🧪⚛️

We're looking at 5000 light years away where baby stars are flinging jets and messing with the gas clouds all around them.

#space #Astronomy #universe

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In short, this pic isn’t just a birthday gift for Hubble. It shows in real time how stars are born and sculpt their surroundings in one of the Milky Way’s stellar nurseries.
Comparing it to the 1997 view lets us measure speeds on human timescales.
After 36 years, #Hubble still delivers wonder.

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Another young star sits at the tip of a triangular horn, with a faint red jet and a green arc where its disk is being eroded by intense UV light from nearby massive stars.

These dynamic features are changing right before our eyes.

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Look closer and you’ll spot the “Cosmic Sea Lemon” – a rusty cloud of gas and dust with a head and undulating body, gliding through space.
One horn is a Herbig-Haro jet of plasma shot out by a hidden protostar over centuries.

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This fresh #Hubble image of the Trifid Nebula is something else. 🔭

Feels like diving into an underwater world but out in space. 🧪⚛️

We're looking at 5000 light years away where baby stars are flinging jets and messing with the gas clouds all around them.

#space #Astronomy #universe

Back in July 2015 New Horizons sent us the first really close shots of Pluto and its moons. The team took that real data plus digital elevation models and turned them into these cool flyover videos — basically letting us “fly” over the surface closer than the spacecraft itself ever did. This still comes from the "Soaring over Pluto" flyover. You’re looking at tall water-ice mountains rising up from the big smooth plains of frozen nitrogen in Sputnik Planitia. The colors are mostly burnt brown and bright white, with some orange patches and darker rough areas off in the distance. Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI / LPI (PIA21863) https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia21863-soaring-over-pluto/

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Ever get that weirdly satisfying feeling when something finally goes way past its original plan?

Well, #NewHorizons just did exactly that. After 20+ years since launch, it's now farther from Pluto than it was back in 2006.

Really wild when you think about it.🔭 🧪 ⚛️

#Space

I feel you. Uranus is absolutely bonkers.
A dedicated orbiter would be amazing. Budget issues at NASA have slowed things down a lot, but both NASA and ESA are still looking at ice giant missions. Hopefully we’ll see one in the 2030s–2040s.

You're welcome!

Yeah, feels like yesterday.
The next 70+ years could bring crewed Mars missions, detailed exploration of Uranus/Neptune, and maybe the first true interstellar probes.

No, the speed won't stay constant. It will continue to decrease very slowly because the Sun's gravity is still pulling on it, even if weakly.

Interesting. Thanks!

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Want to check its position live?

Here's the tracker: theskylive.com/newhorizons-...

Image credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI / LPI (PIA21863)

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The probe is still moving at about 13.6 km/s relative to the Sun, grabbing data on the heliosphere and Kuiper Belt stuff while mostly sleeping in hibernation to stretch the power.
20+ years later and it's still ticking away out there. Honestly blows my mind.

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Just checked TheSkyLive (data based on NASA’s JPL Horizons): New Horizons is in Sagittarius, sitting at about 9.61 billion km from Earth (roughly 64.23 AU).

RA is 19h 23m 52s and Dec is -20° 01’ 00”.

Light takes about 8 hours 54 minutes to get here... crazy.

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At launch the gap between the spacecraft and Pluto was basically the same as Earth-to-Pluto distance then — around 30-32 AU.
Now, years after the 2015 flyby and still cruising outward, it's crossed that line.
Feels like a quiet yet significant win for the mission.

Back in July 2015 New Horizons sent us the first really close shots of Pluto and its moons. The team took that real data plus digital elevation models and turned them into these cool flyover videos — basically letting us “fly” over the surface closer than the spacecraft itself ever did. This still comes from the "Soaring over Pluto" flyover. You’re looking at tall water-ice mountains rising up from the big smooth plains of frozen nitrogen in Sputnik Planitia. The colors are mostly burnt brown and bright white, with some orange patches and darker rough areas off in the distance. Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI / LPI (PIA21863) https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia21863-soaring-over-pluto/

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Ever get that weirdly satisfying feeling when something finally goes way past its original plan?

Well, #NewHorizons just did exactly that. After 20+ years since launch, it's now farther from Pluto than it was back in 2006.

Really wild when you think about it.🔭 🧪 ⚛️

#Space

1883 wool quilt by Ellen Harding Baker: a vast black sky with a blazing yellow Sun at center. Mercury, Venus, Earth with its Moon, and Mars orbit it. Four clumps of objects beyond Mars represent asteroids. Jupiter shows its four Galilean moons, Saturn its rings, Uranus six moons, Neptune one. Top left: streaking Coggia’s Comet. Hundreds of stars dot the darkness. Hand-stitched by an Iowa mom.

🧵
Here's Ellen Harding Baker's "Solar System" quilt.🧪

This is the story.🔭

Back in 1876, an Iowa mom with 7 kids, E. H. Baker, decided that cooking & raising children wasn’t enough for her.

She started working on a wool quilt showing the solar system.

americanhistory.si.edu/collections/...

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The following caption comes from this web page: https://science.nasa.gov/asset/webb/macs-j04175-1154-wide-field-nircam-image/ "A cosmic question mark appears amid a powerful gravitational lens in the James Webb Space Telescope’s wide-field view of the galaxy cluster MACS-J0417.5-1154. Gravitational lensing occurs when something is so massive, like this galaxy cluster, that it warps the fabric of space-time itself, creating a natural funhouse-mirror effect that also magnifies galaxies behind it. The rarely seen type of lensing captured here, which astronomers term hyperbolic umbilic, created five repeated images of one galaxy pair. The red, elongated member of this pair traces the familiar shape of a question mark across the sky due to the distortion, with another unrelated galaxy happening to be in just the right space-time to appear like the question mark’s dot – especially for humans who love to recognize familiar shapes and patterns."

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In case you missed it, here’s the #JWST wide-field view of the huge galaxy cluster MACS-J0417.5-1154, known for its stunning gravitational lensing effects and its wild ongoing merger dance. 🔭 🧪 ⚛️

➡️ webbtelescope.org/contents/new...

#cosmology #extragalactic #space #Astronomy #universe

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Figure 1 from the paper 'Requiem for a belt'. Top-down view of the 800 pc (about 2,610 light-years) region around the Sun (yellow star). Left panel: density of young massive stars (blue) and dust (red), with the Radcliffe Wave and Split shaded, and the old Gould’s Belt model as orange ellipse. Right panel: young star clusters colored by family, with their future trajectories. Credit: Pantaleoni González et al. 2026 (arXiv:2604.13225)

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For 170 years we thought there was a large inclined ring of young stars around the Sun.🔭

A new study using Gaia data shows instead that it doesn’t exist: Gould’s Belt is just a temporary alignment of a few star clusters.🧪⚛️

No ring, just a 3D asterism.

arxiv.org/abs/2604.13225

#galactic

🔭🧪⚛️

The VAST Extragalactic Survey footprint, showing the number of observations of each field. The sky map is plotted with J2000 equatorial coordinates in the Mollweide projection. The VAST Galactic survey is plotted in grey for reference. Typically, each field has been observed 10–11 times to date. Image from de Ruiter et al. (2026)

Excited to announce the first data release from our ASKAP Variables and Slow Transients survey is now available!

doi.org/10.1017/pasa...

This is a database of 6.4 million measurements of 0.5 million radio sources in our survey footprint.

(By @ozgrav.bsky.social Iris de Ruiter)

#RadioAstronomy

At left, an illustration shows a gas giant exoplanet whose right half is illuminated while the left half is in shadow. It is mostly orange shading to pinks and purples at the two poles and shows swirling bands of clouds. Three dark splotches on its upper right show locations where comet fragments impacted the cloudtops, and another incoming comet fragment is seen as a bright spot against the nightside. The planet is against a black background speckled with stars. In the upper right corner of the image shines a small white blob representing its host star. A faint edge-on disk of dust extending from 10 o’clock to 4 o’clock on the star is also white. The words “Artist’s Concept” are at lower left.

Where is the dividing line between stars and the most massive planets? Scientists think it may depend on how they formed. (1/4) 🧵 🔭

Absolutely!

BONUS: For 170 years astronomers debated Gould’s Belt. First noted by Herschel in 1847 as a band of bright stars, it was later seen as a great circle tilted ~20° from the Galactic plane. Many believed it was a real structure. Yet in 1904 Newcomb already suspected it might be just a chance alignment.

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The apparent overall motion of the whole structure disappears when we correctly consider the Sun’s own velocity through the Galaxy.🔭
In short, Gould’s Belt is not a real physical feature of our Galaxy. It’s a temporary 3D asterism that is expected to dissolve within the next ~30 million years.

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The classic inclined shape we call the Belt is largely explained by the Radcliffe Wave — a giant wavy structure of gas and young stars in our local neighbourhood.

One of its large arcs lines up almost exactly with what was long seen as the “ring” of Gould’s Belt.🔭