Mars and the Beehive from last night. 20 April 2025. #AstroDon #Astronomy #Astro #Space #Astrophotography

The laser beams of our Very Large Telescope pierce the star-filled sky of the Atacama Desert in #Chile

The lasers create artificial "stars" in the atmosphere, about 90 km above the ground, which then act as guides. By studying how they are blurred by the atmosphere, the telescope's deformable secondary mirror quickly reshapes itself in real time, yielding very sharp images. It’s almost as good as sending the VLT up into space!

Learn more: https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw2516a/

ESO/A. de Burgos Sierra

Martian Memories

A Stereo3D view captured at Home Plate by the Spirit rover, Oct. 4, 2007 (Sol 1334).

To go 3D: eyes' lines of sight parallel/left image for left eye/right image for right eye. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

! was so excited to see moonless sky with no fog last night. But 2 1/2 hours later it came slamming back. Still, something is better than nothing. This is a double open star cluster image. This is M36, the Pinwheel (upper left) and M38, the starfish (lower right).
#space #astronomy #astrodon

I was so excited to see moonless sky with no fog last night. But 2 1/2 hours later it came slamming back. Still, something is better than nothing. This is a double open star cluster image. This is M36, the Pinwheel (upper left) and M38, the starfish (lower right).
#space #astronomy #astrodon

#Messier 91 is a barred spiral #galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices, located about 60 million light-years from Earth, and reaches its annual culmination at astronomical midnight and is best observed around March 22nd.

Detailed Information: https://astrocamp.eu/m91

▼ Baader Apo 95 Travel Companion | SkyEye62AM '25

We talked about Cassiopeia A (Cas A) during our #Astronomy episode on #cassiopeia here: https://starrytimepodcast.podbean.com/e/cassiopeia-cosmic-background/

And, gotta say, this 3D rendering does not disappoint!!!

#AstroDon #Space #Science #Chandra #Supernova #Astro #JWST #Webb #NASA

: https://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2025/3dmodels/

Massive Star formation G339.88-1.26 - NASA/ESA JWST

Full size 11184x4275 & more info: https://flic.kr/p/2qYAodE
Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/j.Roger/AndreaLuck CC BY

NASA/ESA JWST Space Telescope
Distance: 8900 light years
Filters: f150w2-f162m, f182m, f212n, f360m, f405n-f444w, f444w-f470n, f480m
Colours Assigned: Blue, Cyan, Teal, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red
PI: Yichen Zhang
PI Institution: Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Proposal ID: 3907

I love a good weekend gamma ray burst.

https://astro-colibri.com/event:sb25041901

EX-exoplanet!

Recorded evidence of a star eating a planet before our human eyes!

Must happen quite a lot, wonder if Sol ate a world or two closer than Mercury?

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasa-webbs-autopsy-of-planet-swallowed-by-star-yields-surprise/

Ever see an #astrophotography image and it just feels too... 2D?!

#Chandra & friends have the answer: https://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2025/3dmodels/index.html

As an example, here is G292.0+1.8, a supernova remnant located in the #constellation #Centaurus (we covered this constellation's #astronomy here: https://starrytimepodcast.podbean.com/e/centaurus-cosmic-background/and #mythology here: https://starrytimepodcast.podbean.com/e/centaurus-myths-and-retconstellations/)

I pointed the little seestar s30 at a random part of Vela that had some interesting looking nebulosity in the star atlas and told it to make a mosaic.

Despite it starting to cloud over and about half of all images being useless because of that, it did take 703 10’lsexond snaps and finished in the early hours. This is the result.

It looks like some nice nebulosity that might benefit from having the serious telescope stare at it for a few nights.

The star in the center is HD 77020, the one near the patch of nebulosity at top left is FZ Velorum.

Cosmography archives

1976: A Picture of The Supercluster

by R. Brent Tully and J. Richard Fisher
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1976BAAS....8..555T/abstract

Ok so not surprisingly yesterday's press release about exoplanet science was not really a communication about a discovery of a life signature but, rather, a much more mundane veiled call for a bigger JWST time allocation. These are two very different things when you think about it. #astrodon

2048 × 4096 × 2048 resolution simulation to reach a mixed large / small-scale dynamo regime with magnetic Reynolds numbers = 500, and magnetic Prandtl number Pm=1 (and, incidentally, to debunk a previous recent paper published in Nature).

The Sun is hard (notably because modelling Pm<< 1 remains really hard)

#astrodon #physics

https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2025/04/aa51085-24/aa51085-24.html

This week's sky at a glance, April 18-27. Very useful Sky & Telescope observing guide by Alan MacRobert. #AstroDon #Astronomy #Astro #Space #Astrophotography https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/observing-news/this-weeks-sky-at-a-glance-april-18-27/

Spotting spots!

When we get back from our technical hiatus, we're going to be talking about the #moons of #jupiter

:https://esahubble.org/images/heic2412a/

HOLY MOLY!!!.. It’s: “Return of the Aurora…”. What an epic #auroraborealis / #northernlights display (yet again..) over Courtmacsherry areas in West Cork, Ireland as light pillars ‘dance’ in the night sky! #aurora #astronomy #Astrodon #sunset #astronomy #spring #april #easter #Cork #Ireland #mastodon #mastoart #mastodonart #mastoartist #mastodonartist #mastodaoine #photography #photo #photograph #photographer #landscape #landscapephotography #art #colours #nature #naturephotography