For reference I am set in California and I took this picture around 9:30pm. I think Jupiter is at the left of the moon and Venus is at the bottom right but just want to make sure if im mistaken or not.
I wanted to share this with a group of people who would appreciate. Amazing find at my local library book sale for 25 cent. No reason to believe this is not real. The universe has blessed me.
sure, it might be some other green material, but if a planet is in the habitable zone, has oceans and green, unidentifiable land, can't we just assume that thats some type of grass or plant?
I often see things about "earth like exoplanets" get thrown around on the internet. The videos in which I hear of them make them out to be completely clear and confirmed to be habitable for life, some even more than earth, but how much of that is actually official knowledge and how much are just rumors? I also dont hear alot of said exoplanets aside from clickbait looking youtube videos
EDIT: i dont specifically mean grass, but generally some kind of organic matter that covers large areas of land
Painting Airbrush on cs10 canvas from the Artworks gallery London. Painted for the Planetary Society Inspired by the Late Carl Sagan.
🔭 Equipment ✨
Target: M101, Pinwheel Galaxy
Distance: 21-25 Million Light Years
Size: 170,000 light years across
Scope: ZWO FF65
Camera: ASI2600mc-pro
Filter: Astromania 2" UHC Filter
Mount: AM3
Controller: ASIAir Mini
Tripod: TC40
Exposures: 180 sec x 107 subs
Total: 5 hrs 21 min
Bortle: 4
Social: IG Lowell_Astrophotography
Processed in Pixinsight and Lightroom
More M17 data
Shot with a Vespera III - no filter (550 stacks x 10s) in Bortle 7 skies
Side note: starless images look so badass
I wanted to keep them loose, the photographs are already perfect (thank you James Web and various probes!) so why not add some human touch to it.
These are Acrylic on 6x6in panels each and I painted them one color at a time, like a CYMK printer :D
Saturn has been the fan fave!
Painting Airbrush on cs10 canvas from the Artworks Gallery London. Painted for the Astronomy Magazine.
Painting oil on canvas painted for the Planetary Society USA.
The tilting of saturn's Rings. I took all these images with my 5/6 inch telescopes, you can also see the clarity increase after 2022, due to me switching to an astronomy camera. Its awesome to see these changes on planets over time through your own telescope.
Setups:
Skywatcher 150p + 10mm eyepiece + 2x barlow and samsung a13 phone camera for 2022 shot
All others with celestron 5 inch SCT + zwo178mc !and 2x/3x barlow lenses
I captured this prominence tornado the other day. This is about one hour of filming.
17 hours worth of picutres combined to make this image of The Western Veil Nebula, part of the Cygnus Loop.
Taken from my backyard in bortle 9 skies in Arizona
Setup - Redcat 51, ASI533MM Pro, EQ6-R
Processed in Pixinsight
Source: NASA
We often see people posting websites or apps generated with Claude or something that are supposed to predict objects visible at night from their location, and they usually get the expected pushback, but what is the actual go-to software for astronomy target finding and prediction? Something like Stellarium is useful when you already know what to look for, but I imagine a situation where you happen to have time one day to bring your telescope outside under the night sky and just want a target list filtered using your location and current conditions, such as planet distance from the Sun as well as their angular size, etc
Is there even such software that would incorporate a wide variety of things, like planetary positions, DSOs, bright satellite passes, maybe even various occultations and transits?
A newly discovered asteroid the size of an adult blue whale is set to fly past Earth today (May 18) at 24% of the average Earth-moon distance, and you can watch the event unfold in real time from the comfort of your home with this Virtual Telescope Project livestream.
The near-Earth asteroid 2026 JH2 was discovered on May 10 by the Mount Lemmon Survey in Arizona. Follow-up observations estimate the asteroid measures between 52 and 114 feet (16-35 meters) based on its apparent brightness, according to ESA.
2026 JH2 will make its closest approach to Earth at 5:23 p.m. (2123 GMT) on May 18, when it passes within 56,628 miles (91,135 kilometers), while traveling at 19,417 mph (31,248 km/h) relative to Earth.
Rho Ophiuchi Cloud Complex:
Kelso Dunes - Mojave Desert CA 5.15.26 Bortle 2
Aquisition
Camera: Nikon Z5 HA Modified
Lens: Rokinon 135mm F/2 - Photo taken stopped down to F/2.8
ISO: 1000
Mount: Skywatcher 100i
Guided with PHD2
Sub Frame Length: 120 Seconds
Lights: 139
Darks: 24
Flats: 60
Biases: 60
Preprocessed in Siril
Green Noise removal
Removed stars with starnet plugin
Background extraction
graxpert background extraction and denoise
Post processed in Affinity Photo 2
Exposure
Levels
Contract & Brightness
Vibrance
Selective color
Merged Starless Image with Star map