SpacePics

[Image Description: A cluster of stars in warm and cool colours. The whole view is filled with small stars, which become much denser and brighter around a core just right of centre. Most of the stars are small, but some are larger with a round, brightly-coloured glow and four sharp diffraction spikes. Behind the stars, a dark background can be seen.]

Hi, Just wanted to drop a line. I love all the awesome pictures being posted and I have always had an interest in astrophotography. I have a relatively inexpensive telescope and no idea what I'm doing, lol. But I e been doing a lot of research and am hoping to get some photos of the moon for example as a starting place in the coming month.

Thanks!

A river delta inside an impact crater? Yep. By woodgrainterrain.com

Grains of cosmic dust streaked through night skies in early May. Swept up as planet Earth plowed through the debris streams left behind by periodic Comet Halley, the annual meteor shower is known as the Eta Aquarids. This year, the Eta Aquarids peak was visually hampered by May's bright Full Moon, though. But early morning hours surrounding last May's shower of Halley dust were free of moonlight interference. In exposures recorded between April 28 and May 8 in 2022, this composited image shows nearly 90 Eta Aquarid meteors streaking from the shower's radiant in Aquarius over San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. The central Milky Way arcs above in the southern hemisphere's predawn skies. The faint band of light rising from the horizon is Zodiacal light, caused by dust scattering sunlight near our Solar System's ecliptic plane. Along the ecliptic and entrained in the Zodiacal glow are the bright planets Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn. Of course Mars itself has recently been found to be a likely source of the dust along the ecliptic responsible for creating Zodiacal light.

Source: NASA

Charon is 1,214 kilometers (754 miles) across. That's about 1/10th the size of planet Earth but a whopping 1/2 the diameter of Pluto itself, and makes it the largest satellite relative to its parent body in the Solar System. Still, the moon appears as a small bump at about the 1 o'clock position on Pluto's disk in the grainy, negative,telescopic picture inset at upper left. That view was used by James Christy and Robert Harrington at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Flagstaff to discover Charon in June of 1978.

A darkened and mysterious north polar region known to some as Mordor Macula caps this premier high-resolution view. The portrait of Charon, Pluto's largest moon, was captured by New Horizons near the spacecraft's closest approach on July 14, 2015. The combined blue, red, and infrared data was processed to enhance colors and follow variations in Charon's surface properties with a resolution of about 2.9 kilometers (1.8 miles).

Source: NASA

Source: The Furthest Pictures of Earth Ever Taken https://mashable.com/article/earth-pictures-images-from-space

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/1210989

Source: NASA

What is that large dark spot on Jupiter? It's the shadow of Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon. When Jupiter's moons cross between the Jovian giant and the Sun, they created shadows just like when the Earth's moon crosses between the Earth and the Sun. Also like on Earth, if you were in a dark shadow on Jupiter, you would see a moon completely eclipse the Sun. Unlike on Earth, moon shadows occur most days on Jupiter -- what's more unusual is that a spacecraft was close enough to record one with a high-resolution image. That spacecraft, Juno, was passing so close to Jupiter in late February that nearby clouds and the dark eclipse shadow appear relatively large. Juno has made many discoveries about our Solar System's largest planet, including, recently, rapidly expanding circular auroras.

his tantalizing trio of galaxies sometimes called the Draco Group, is located in the northern constellation of Draco, the Dragon all found within this single telescopic field of view that spans a little more than the width of the full moon.

A mere 390 light-years away, Sun-like stars and future planetary systems are forming in the Rho Ophiuchi molecular cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to our fair planet. The James Webb Space Telescope's NIRCam peered into the nearby natal chaos to capture this infrared image at an inspiring scale.

An increase in surface activity is expected because our Sun is approaching solar maximum in 2025. However, last month our Sun sprouted more sunspots than in any month during the entire previous 11-year solar cycle -- and even dating back to 2002. The featured picture is a composite of images taken every day from January to June by NASA's Solar Dynamic Observatory. Showing a high abundance of sunspots, large individual spots can be tracked across the Sun's disk, left to right, over about two weeks. As a solar cycle continues, sunspots typically appear closer to the equator. Sunspots are just one way that our Sun displays surface activity -- another is flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that expel particles out into the Solar System. Since these particles can affect astronauts and electronics, tracking surface disturbances is of more than aesthetic value. Conversely, solar activity can have very high aesthetic value -- in the Earth's atmosphere when they trigger aurora.

IMO the 'heart' looks more like a chode with huge balls

This is my most ambitious astrophotography project yet, coming in at over 110 hours 18 minutes of total exposure time (albeit across 12 panels), beating out my previous record of 101 hours on the Elephant Trunk Nebula

The 12 panel mosaic ended up being 518 megapixels in size after cropping, and was an absolute bitch to process. probably never gonna do a mosaic this big again unless I have some quantum supercomputer. I don't have any way to reliably host this on my flickr page, so the image you're seeing is a 2X downsample.

Captured over 35 nights from October 2022 through March 2023, from my Bortle 8 apartment balcony

could only do 4 hours max per night thanks to my wonderful horizons from the balcony overhang

Places where I host my other images:

Instagram | Flickr

Equipment:

• TPO 6" F/4 Imaging Newtonian

• Orion Sirius EQ-G

• ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro

• Skywatcher Quattro Coma Corrector

• ZWO EFW 8x1.25"/31mm

• Astronomik LRGB+CLS Filters- 31mm

• Astrodon 31mm Ha 5nm, Oiii 3nm, Sii 5nm

• Agena 50mm Deluxe Straight-Through Guide Scope

• ZWO ASI-120mc for guiding

• Moonlite Autofocuser

Acquisition: 110 hours 18 minutes (Camera at -15°C)

all narrowband exposures were 360" and unity gain

all broadband exposures were 30" and at half unity gain

• Darks- 30

• Flats- 30 per filter

Capture Software:

• Captured using N.I.N.A. and PHD2 for guiding and dithering.

PixInsight processing:

/u/Aerions_'s Heart and Fishhead pic was a bit of an inspiration for me when processing this (and imo their colors are better)

Preprocessing

• BatchPreProcessing

• StarAlignment

• Blink

• ImageIntegration per channel per panel

• DrizzleIntegration (2x, Var β=1.5) per panel per channel

Creating the mosaic:

I had numerous other attempts to make this using microsoft ICE and mosaicbycoordinates/photometricmosaic, but they all refused to work that well. During this process I found out that the .tiff file format has a max size of around 530 megapixels

• StarGenerator to generate a starfield of the region at the same image scale as my drizzled images

• StarAlignment to align each drizzled stack to the synthetic starfield

despite reading all the documentation and tinkering with every setting, my blue stars channel for panel 11 refused to align properly with any of the other channels, so the stars here are a bit mismatched

• GradientMergeMosaic to combine these aligned panels into the master stacks

• DynamicCrop away the edges of each master

Narrowband Linear:

• DynamicBackground Extraction

duplicated each image and removed stars via StarXterminator. Ran DBE with a shitload of points to generate background model. model subtracted from original pic using the following PixelMath (thanks, /u/jimmythechicken1!)

$T * med(model) / model

• BlurXTerminator

• StarXterminator to completely remove stars (narrowband images will be starless processed for almost the rest of the workflow)

• NoiseXterminator

• HistogramTransformations to bring nonlinear

More agressive stretch for Oiii and Sii

RGB Linear:

• ChannelCombination to combine R G and B masters into a color image

• SpectrophotometricColorCalibration

• HSV Repair

• StarXterminator to make a stars only image (this stars only image to be used going forward)

• AcrsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear

Nonlinear:

did this over the course of a couple weeks/processing breaks so the details aren't exact

• PixelMath to combine stretched narrowband masters into color image

SHO --> RGB (classic Hubble Palette)

• HistogramTransformations to adjust channel intensities

• CurveTransformations for slight hue adjustments

• LRGBCombination using stretched Ha as luminance

• shitloads of CurveTransformations to adjust hue, lightness, saturation, etc. (some with lum masks)

• invert > SCNR > invert to remove background magentas

• probably used BackgroundNeutralization at some point around here too

• LocalHistogramEqualization

Two round of this: one at kernel radius 16 for the finer 'feathery' details and one at 200+ for larger structures

• more curves!

• NoiseXterminator

• more histogramtransformation tweaks

• DarkStructureEnhance

• Relinearized narrowband and stars images to add in the RGB stars

"unstretched" both images with histogramtransformation midtones set to 0.9999

pixelmath to just add those two images together

histogramtransformation to un-relinearize them by setting midtones to 0.0001

• ColorSaturation

• MLT for chrominance noise reduction

• final round of noiseX

• guess what baby more curves

• one final round of DBE to remove a small red gradient in the bottom corner that made it through to the end somehow

just to please Jimmy

• IntegerResample to 50%

• annotation

If our Sun were part of this star cluster, the night sky would glow like a jewel box of bright stars. This cluster, known as M53 and cataloged as NGC 5024, is one of about 250 globular clusters that survive in our Galaxy. Most of the stars in M53 are older and redder than our Sun, but some enigmatic stars appear to be bluer and younger. These young stars might contradict the hypothesis that all the stars in M53 formed at nearly the same time. These unusual stars are known as blue stragglers and are unusually common in M53. After much debate, blue stragglers are now thought to be stars rejuvenated by fresh matter falling in from a binary star companion. By analyzing pictures of globular clusters like the featured image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers use the abundance of stars like blue stragglers to help determine the age of the globular cluster and hence a limit on the age of the universe. M53, visible with a binoculars towards the constellation of Bernice's Hair (Coma Berenices), contains over 250,000 stars and is one of the furthest globulars from the center of our Galaxy.

Source: NASA

NASA - Image Credit: Mark Hanson; Data: Mike Selby

Why do some spiral galaxies have a ring around the center? Spiral galaxy NGC 1398 not only has a ring of pearly stars, gas and dust around its center, but a bar of stars and gas across its center, and spiral arms that appear like ribbons farther out. The featured deep image from Observatorio El Sauce in Chile shows the grand spiral galaxy in impressive detail. NGC 1398 lies about 65 million light years distant, meaning the light we see today left this galaxy when dinosaurs were disappearing from the Earth. The photogenic galaxy is visible with a small telescope toward the constellation of the Furnace (Fornax). The ring near the center is likely an expanding density wave of star formation, caused either by a gravitational encounter with another galaxy, or by the galaxy's own gravitational asymmetries.

This shows the Messier 16 Eagle Nebula region of the sky in true color, without the use of any filter. This region is most often captured in narrowband. You can see the wings of the eagle spanning in rich hydrogen alpha gas, and the bright stars lighting up the famous Pillars of Creation.

Source: Antoine Grelin

Deep in the South constellation Apus lies a truly spectacular field of nebulosity. Not far from the South Celestial Pole (at declination -80º), this nebula is very rarely captured, especially in full colour. This image shows a region catalogued by Steve Mandel and Michael Wilson in early 2000s as the 9th and last entry to their "Catalogue of Unexplored Nebulae" [1]. This pioneering project identified the interstellar clouds in optical light, before only known to professional astronomers through infrared surveys. Mandel named the nebulae Integrated Flux Nebula, or IFN, a name that is frequently quoted in amateur astrophotography, but seldomly used in professional astronomy, where "galactic cirrus" is preferred.

The Galactic Cirri are veils that surround our galaxy – made of dust and gas in the interstellar space. It was first noticed on optical glass plates recorded at Palomar Observatory and subsequently cataloged by B. T. Lynds, in 1965. In the 2000s, Steve Mandel noticed faint cirrus in deep, wide field photographs near the North Celestial Pole, and labelled the nebulosity as the IFN, or the Integrated Flux Nebula. [2] It has incredibly low surface brightness, at ~22-28 mag/arcsec² (fainter than the darkest sky background on Earth), thus it is not easy to capture!

Source: Gabriel Santos

A spiral galaxy with a small central bar, M66 is a member of the Leo Galaxy Triplet, a group of three galaxies about 30 million light years from us. The Leo Triplet is a popular target for relatively small telescopes, in part because M66 and its galactic companions M65 and NGC 3628 all appear separated by about the angular width of a full moon. The featured image of M66 was taken by Hubble to help investigate the connection between star formation and molecular gas clouds. Clearly visible are bright blue stars, pink ionized hydrogen clouds -- sprinkled all along the outer spiral arms, and dark dust lanes in which more star formation could be hiding.

Source: NASA

The growth of this community continues to amaze me. We've made this the premier Space-related sub on Lemmy and continue to bring in new user's at a huge pace. There's a continued increase in user contribution as well and it's great seeing the different celestial objects or image types that different users prefer.

Please continue to post and comment so we can continue to make this an exciting and welcoming community.

Also, if you're new here, know that this is a friendly place that you should feel comfortable joining. Please remember to share your suggestions, I want this community to be active and reflect what the user's want it to be.

Thanks and continue being awesome.

The Pelican Nebula is changing. The entire nebula, officially designated IC 5070, is divided from the larger North America Nebula by a molecular cloud filled with dark dust. The Pelican, however, is particularly interesting because it is an unusually active mix of star formation and evolving gas clouds. The featured picture was processed to bring out two main colors, red and blue, with the red dominated by light emitted by interstellar hydrogen. Ultraviolet light emitted by young energetic stars is slowly transforming cold gas in the nebula to hot gas, with the advancing boundary between the two, known as an ionization front, visible in bright red across the image center. Particularly dense tentacles of cold gas remain. Millions of years from now this nebula might no longer be known as the Pelican, as the balance and placement of stars and gas will surely leave something that appears completely different.

These three bright nebulae are often featured on telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius and the crowded starfields of the central Milky Way. In fact, 18th century cosmic tourist Charles Messier cataloged two of them; M8, the large nebula below and right of center, and colorful M20 near the top of the frame. The third emission region includes NGC 6559, left of M8 and separated from the larger nebula by a dark dust lane. All three are stellar nurseries about five thousand light-years or so distant. Over a hundred light-years across the expansive M8 is also known as the Lagoon Nebula. M20's popular moniker is the Trifid. Glowing hydrogen gas creates the dominant red color of the emission nebulae. But for striking contrast, blue hues in the Trifid are due to dust reflected starlight. The broad interstellarscape spans almost 4 degrees or 8 full moons on the sky.

Why would the sky glow like a giant repeating rainbow? Airglow. The air glows all of the time, but it is usually hard to see. A disturbance however -- like an approaching storm -- may cause noticeable rippling in the Earth's atmosphere. These gravity waves are oscillations in air analogous to those created when a rock is thrown in calm water. The long-duration exposure nearly along the vertical walls of airglow likely made the undulating structure particularly visible. OK, but where do the colors originate? The deep red glow likely originates from OH molecules about 87-kilometers high, excited by ultraviolet light from the Sun. The orange and green airglow is likely caused by sodium and oxygen atoms slightly higher up. The featured image was captured during a climb up Mount Pico in the Azores of Portugal. Ground lights originate from the island of Faial in the Atlantic Ocean. A spectacular sky is visible through this banded airglow, with the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy running up the image center, and M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, visible near the top left.

Europa is one of the moons of Jupiter. It is especially interesting because it is thought to have water oceans under it's icy surface which could potentially harbor life!
Source: NASA

NASA - Eta Carinae may be about to explode. But no one knows when - it may be next year, it may be one million years from now. Eta Carinae's mass - about 100 times greater than our Sun - makes it an excellent candidate for a full blown supernova. Historical records do show that about 170 years ago Eta Carinae underwent an unusual outburst that made it one of the brightest stars in the southern sky. Eta Carinae, in the Keyhole Nebula, is the only star currently thought to emit natural LASER light. This featured image brings out details in the unusual nebula that surrounds this rogue star. Diffraction spikes, caused by the telescope, are visible as bright multi-colored streaks emanating from Eta Carinae's center. Two distinct lobes of the Homunculus Nebula encompass the hot central region, while some strange radial streaks are visible in red extending toward the image right. The lobes are filled with lanes of gas and dust which absorb the blue and ultraviolet light emitted near the center. The streaks, however, remain unexplained.

I took this picture of the horsehead and flame nebula at the beginning of 2020.

It's a composite of 36x 100s exposures. Taken with a Canon 6D, Tamron 150-600mm. Tracked on a skyadventurer with a guidescope for better tracking.