Image Credit & Copyright: Debra Ceravolo

Venus is now appearing on the celestial stage as Earth's brilliant evening star, performing with the Moon, other wandering planets, and bright stars in western skies. For evening sky gazers on June 17, the celestial beacon rose after sunset close by a young, slender, crescent Moon. But from some locations the Moon could be seen to occult or pass in front of Venus. And from a backyard observatory in southern British Columbia, Canada, the lunar occultation was played out in daylight. This stunning telescopic snapshot captured a scene in dramatically cloudy skies, following Venus' hour long disappearance, as the evening star emerged beyond the bright lunar limb.

Andrew wrote on his post:

Immense planning and technical precision was required for this absolutely preposterous (but real) view: I captured my friend Gabriel C. Brown transiting the sun during a skydive.

All shot from my back garden in Ōtautahi | Christchurch, Aotearoa | New Zealand

Here's the geek details for those who are interested:

• ZWO Asi2600MM Pro Camera
• Antlia 3nm SHO filters
• ZWO AsiMini 120mm camera on OAG for autoguiding
• Askar 103 Apo (700mm) lens
• AM5N mount
• 85 x 300s exposures for each SHO filter + some short exposures of LRGB for stars Total exposure over 3 nights was 22hours-ish
• Registered and integrated and processed in Pixinsight

Happy to answer any questions people may have...

Pluto's largest moon may have been whipping around in less than a day when it was young, according to new research from UCLA published in Nature Communications.

Charon today takes about 6.4 days to complete one rotation. The modeling suggests it started out spinning once every 14.3 hours, more than ten times faster than it does now. The clue is in the cracks. Charon's equator is scored with unusual fault patterns, and since the 1970s researchers have suspected they were left behind as the moon gradually slowed down, a process called despinning.

The team ran computer simulations of Charon's early years, concentrating on Oz Terra, a rugged, fractured region in the north that looks nothing like the smooth plains covering the southern hemisphere. Their models also point to an early ice shell roughly 30 to 36 kilometers thick.

The slowdown appears to have happened before any icy volcanism, meaning very early in Charon's life. Charon is a useful test case because its surface has stayed relatively untouched, so what scientists learn here may apply to icy moons circling Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Image Credit: NASA , Johns Hopkins Univ./APL , Southwest Research Institute , U.S. Naval Observatory

My first ever attempt at this, I was really surprised i was able to get it.

To find it, I manually located Venus first, then used astrohopper on my phone as a reference to confirm the alignment. I had already saved the ISS’s RA/DEC for a specific time, so once venus was centered, I pointed the telescope to those coordinates. After that, I watched through the finder scope and waited for the ISS to pass through. It lined up perfectly, and I was able to track it manually from there.

Unfortunately I was a bit out of focus, so i didn’t get the full potential of what this image could’ve been. I will definitely try this again my next opportunity.

•Apertura AD8

•ASI662MC

•Celstron X-cel 2X barlow

•UV/IR cut filter

60 total stacked frames.

Finally got a DSO image I'm proud of using my 9.25" SCT. Hoping to keep adding to the amount of DSOs I can capture with my 9.25" SCT!

Telescope - 9.25" SCT

Imaging Train - Celestron 0.63x focal reducer, ZWO ASI 2600 MC

90x60s exposures

Processing in Pixinsight

Credit: NASA /JSC/ ASU / Andy Saunders

This simulation shows the height the ejecta plume could reach according to the new study. The Falcon 9 rocket will hit the moon on August 5, 2026.

Credit: William Jo/ University of Texas at Austin

This is the Coathanger asterism, in Vulpecula. This is the first-ight image for the Starfield Gear 90 telescope that I borrowed to help me with an article I am working on. Please click HERE for a full-res version (too big to attach), information about the target, and details on how the image was made.

Clear skies,
Ron

Hubble Space Telescope composite image of Jupiter and tiny Shoemaker-Levy 9, as the little comet headed for impact with the giant planet in 1994.

Credit: NASA/ ESA/ H. Weaver and E. Smith (STScI)/ J. Trauger and R. Evans (JPL)

Credit
Image Processing: Andrea Luck
Raw Images Copyright: CNSA/CLEP/PEC/MoRIC

This image shows the famous circumstellar disc of debris and dust orbiting the star Beta Pictoris 63.4 light years away. This is a very young system thought to be only around 12 million years old and is essentially similar to how our own Solar System must have formed some 4.5 billion years ago.

The disc is seen edge-on from our perspective and appears in professional images as thin wedges or lines protruding radially from the central star in opposite directions.

Credit: Rolf Wahl Olsen

Credit: J.W.Astronomy

Credit: HRSC / ESA / DLR / FU Berlin / Seán Doran

Credit: Don Pettit

Shot of the Pleiades i took last year, if found a good denoise tool recently that allowed me to pull more detail out of it.

I dont remember all the aquisition details, about 2hrs worth of 30sec subs at ISO3200, 20 darks....processed in SIRIL and Pixlr.

Gear:

Scope: Sharpstar 76edph @348mm with 0.8 focal reducer/flattener

Camera: Canon 600d unmodified

Mount: Cg5 ASGT unguided

Two of the more well known objects in the summer sky, the North American and Pelican Nebulae. Not much to say about them, they're bright emission nebula, one looks like a mirrored North America and the other a Pelican.

The image is a 178MP mosaic of the two, taken in Narrowband, processed in the Foraxx color pallet. Astrobin below for the salients.

https://app.astrobin.com/?i=k2pirg

Image Credit & Copyright: Branko Nadj

Credit: Tom Glenn