astronomy

On Dec. 30, 1930, the first-ever photo of the Earth’s curvature was taken by Lieutenant Colonel Albert William Stevens, who was an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps and an aerial photographer....

I’m planning to go to a rural spot that has a Bortle class 3 night sky around Southern California. Can anyone recommend a beginner friendly telescope with decent magnification for around $200? I’m not interested in using an accompanying smart phone app to go with it either. I’d like to see nebulae and galaxies the most....

So I’ve been posting space related stuff here for a while over !space to distribute content more, within the last few weeks though it was closed and now directs posting to this other mander space comm !space which is titled “Space & Astronomy”...

This moon is doomed. Mars, the red planet named for the Roman god of war, has two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, whose names are derived from the Greek for Fear and Panic. These Martian moons may well be captured asteroids originating in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter or perhaps from even more distant reaches of...

Image Credit & Copyright: Włodzimierz Bubak; Text: Ogetay Kayali (MTU)...

Looking like the clouds are finally going to break tonight. The moon’s quickly heading towards the new moon, and we’ve got Virgo rising. I’m excited to get out and check some targets off my list....

So, if an academic paper is published in an open journal by an average citizen with an obsession for learning from online sources. So, there are no credentials but a decent work history. A prestigious college downloads the paper. What are the possible reasons?

“Put ya claddin hands toge’dah for de one, de only… Ursa Maajaahh…brrrrrr!!!”...

I’ve got clear skies where I’m at, and I’m ready to try and cross some things off my observation list....

Hey everyone!...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYcKYvGsiYc...

Hey everybody, I know it’s a little late, but I wasn’t really sure how the weather was going to be until a little while ago. I’d like to invite you all to join me in looking at the sky tonight. What’s on the menu:...

Channel was here: www.youtube.com/hubblespacetelescope...

I know we did Fridays last time. The weather was bad, so I kinda forgot about it. The transparency tonight is looking suboptimal, and, given my options, I might just settle for hitting some binary stars. My best view is of the eastern sky, and most everything there right now is faint fuzzies, so I don’t have especially high...

On flight day 13 (November 28, 2022) of the Artemis 1 mission, the Orion spacecraft reached its maximum distance from Earth. At over 430,000 kilometers from Earth, its distant retrograde orbit also puts Orion nearly 70,000 kilometers from the Moon. In the same field of view in this video frame from flight day 13, planet and...

Eight billion people are about to disappear in this snapshot from space taken on 2022 November 21. On the sixth day of the Artemis I mission, their home world is setting behind the Moon’s bright edge as viewed by an external camera on the outbound Orion spacecraft. Orion was headed for a powered flyby that took it to within...

Maybe this lives in showerthoughts, but Chile has a lot of large telescopes and you often hear its because they’re on mountains above clouds. The border with Argentina goes through the middle of the mountains so it seems like it should be a good spot for telescopes too....

I have been searching online for information, but i fail to find anything concrete....

What part of Orion is this? Just north of the famous Orion Nebula is a picturesque star forming region in Orion’s Sword that contains a lot of intricate dust – some of which appears blue because it reflects the light of bright embedded stars. The region’s popular name is the Running Man Nebula because, looked at from the...

Mars has put on a happy face. The Martian crater Galle is famous because it has internal markings that make it look like a face that is both smiling and winking. These markings were originally discovered in the 1970s in pictures taken by the Viking Orbiter. The Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft that orbited Mars from 1996 to...

NGC 1333 is seen in visible light as a reflection nebula, dominated by bluish hues characteristic of starlight reflected by interstellar dust. A mere 1,000 light-years distant toward the heroic constellation Perseus, it lies at the edge of a large, star-forming molecular cloud. This telescopic close-up spans over two full moons...