2020 July 16

This surreal timelapse, landscape, panorama spans predawn, blue hour, and sunrise skies. Close to the start of spring in the northern hemisphere, this amazing lapse was captured between 4:30 and 7:00 am from a location overlooking northern New Mexico's Rio Grande Valley. In tracked images of the night sky just before twilight begins, the Milky Way is cast across the southern (right) edge of the panoramic frame. Toward the east, a range of short and long exposures resolves the changing brightness as the Sun rises over the distant peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. In between, exposures made during the spring morning's tantalizing blue hour are used to blend the night sky and sunrise over the high desert landscape.

Image Credit & Copyright: Paul Schmit

Jupiter

The ice fountains of Enceladus, taken by Cassini

2020 June 30

Bright Planetary Nebula NGC 7027 from Hubble Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Joel Kastner (RIT) et al.; Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

Explanation: What created this unusual planetary nebula? NGC 7027 is one of the smallest, brightest, and most unusually shaped planetary nebulas known. Given its expansion rate, NGC 7027 first started expanding, as visible from Earth, about 600 years ago. For much of its history, the planetary nebula has been expelling shells, as seen in blue in the featured image. In modern times, though, for reasons unknown, it began ejecting gas and dust (seen in red) in specific directions that created a new pattern that seems to have four corners. These shells and patterns have been mapped in impressive detail by recent images from the Wide Field Camera 3 onboard the Hubble Space Telescope. What lies at the nebula’s center is unknown, with one hypothesis holding it to be a close binary star system where one star sheds gas onto an erratic disk orbiting the other star. NGC 7027, about 3,000 light years away, was first discovered in 1878 and can be seen with a standard backyard telescope toward the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus).

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200630.html

Heart of the Scorpion 

This is my first shot of Orion Nebula from home (Nice, France) on Nov 14th. Taken with C8 EdgeHD, Nikon D750, ISO6400,10s. My next step is to fine tune my mount tracking (was done in a rush), take longer exposures and stack several shots. Hopefully this week-end.

Traverse City, Michigan by Lenon James

Carina Nebula Close Up. From NASA APOD.

Green Point by DaveGosling on Fivehundredpx

A picture of the solar eclipse from the ISS