jay

amateur (astro)photographer, hobbyist astronomer and space enthusiast 🌒

[eclipse-astro]

happy international moon day! 🌒🌓🌕🌗🌘

here's every full moon i've captured over the past 2 years:

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forgot to post this here, last month's full sturgeon moon 🌕

shot on my nikon d500 & tamron 150-600mm lens 📸

[eclipse-astro]

the full corn moon 🌕

shot on my nikon d500 & tamron 150-600mm lens, composite of 2 photos 📸

[sophie-frm-mars]

What I can see in the eyepiece and what I can take pictures of is tragically never the same, but I've just seen the shadow that Saturn casts on its own rings and I'm absolutely blown away like holy shit. I love astronomy.

I'm hoping that as autumn and winter progress, as Saturn will be regularly outside my south facing window at earlier and earlier times, I can take enough pictures that with exposure stacking and compositing I'll be able to show what I just saw - Saturn with clear rings with a shadow across them, and Titan - on pictures I can share here

🪐🔭🐈

[xvesperrose]

Let the cat out early this morning and the night sky was SO clear and the stars were so bright I didn't need to wear my glasses to see how bright they were.

Ended up downloading an app and was stood stargazing in my garden at 4am looking at Jupiter and Cassiopeia ✨

[nawza26]

I just found out that uranus got a new moon lol

[bleachedblacksocks]

noone I know is awake so I shall scream into the void

[bleachedblacksocks]

anyways I GOT TO TAKE A PICTURE OF JUPITER AND 4 OF ITS MOONS.

LOOK AT IT, MOTHERFUCKERS

yeah, I know it's not the best, BUT I TOOK IT. I SAW IT. FUCK YEAH.

[hopex4]

Can someone explain to me like I'm a toddler why I can see the moon in the day time when it's supposed to be on the other side of the planet?

Similar to the sun. Like in the nightime, the sun is over there, NOT over here, why doesn't the moon move why does the sun get to move???? WHY CAN I SEE THE MOON AT NIGHT AND DAY BUT I CAN ONLY SES THE SUN IN THE DAY??

[eclipse-astro]

the key difference here is that sun creates the day, via being bright, the moon does not create the night. night is the absence of sunlight, the moon is completely unrelated and is just a large rock ball orbiting earth at an arbitrary speed.

if you put a bright light 10ft in front of you, and put a ball hanging on a string at eye level and had it go around you slowly, sometimes that ball would appear to be on the same side of you as the light, and sometimes you would have to turn away from the light to see it.

on average, the moon is visible in the sky (above the horizon) during daylight roughly the same amount of time as it is during night.

hope this answers your question!

[patchyworx]

Just a guy who is so so normal about the sky and space (gets literally anything i can that pertains to celestial objects in any way like constellation patterned clothes and stuff)

[commander-ledi]

link to download a zip folder containing several gigabytes of full resolution hubble space images :)

[commander-ledi]

im. going to have autistic gay sex with these images.

[commander-ledi]

Sharpest ever view of the Andromeda Galaxy

Sharpest ever view of the Andromeda Galaxy

i am so hard rn

[bloodyraven1001]

If y'all want you can also download any interesting images using

MAST Home

The Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) is an astronomical data archive focused on astronomical data sets in the optical

Or you can browse through the data of different sky surveys using

Usually these images will be in the form of FITS files which can be exported as jpegs or pngs using SAO-DS9 which is a freely available software. If you're familiar with a little bit of computer coding you can play around with it too.

[unemploymentbus]

All of this + most NASA analysis software used by researchers is free and openly available (same for databases and telescope archives)!!! It is NOT easy to use but I’ve always found it heartening that most of what I use to do my work is freely accessible to the public.

[nnay-naee]

Things I've heard from people looking through a telescope for the first time:

HOLY CRAP!!!

Do I manage to see the American flag on the moon?

Oh, but I'm smart, you know. I know that the moon is not a planet.

No... I don't see it... OH! YES! I DO NOW!

No fucking way.

You must be kidding. This can't be the actual Saturn I'm looking at.

Hey! Look at this! I can even see tiny aliens all around

[bleachedblacksocks]

God I FUCKING HATE CLOUDS. I just wanna see the stars and the plane but NOOOO.

WATER VAPOUR IS SUCH A BITCH!

[augmentedchordsofficial]

Went to a stargazing event last night and met someone who had to think to name a single planet 😭

[rot-pith]

space exploration and all science in general is only possible because of curiosity and the inherently human need to understand. without the love for discovery, we won't have anything at all. this is seen especially in space science. other fields of science are studied because they are necessary to life. space science is unique in that it barely affects us at all. so utility-wise there's no reason to study space. but we do it anyway. because science is the love for the unknown. science is the greatest culmination of curiosity. NASA has space rovers on mars. they name each rover based on the qualities that they think are the foundations of what humanity is. my favourite rover was named curiosity. she's so darling to me. to NASA, one of the most important human qualities is curiosity.

[eclipse-astro]

this post is wrong (in that sense that, studying space and exploring it has incidentally invented a ton of modern tech everyone uses now)

and i love it anyways because, to be honest it doesn't really matter whether or not it did that, space science and exploration is still worthwhile regardless of if it provides us with practical benefits or not

[imjustexistingtbh]

if you are ever in the middle of nowhere at night and you have the chance to look up, DO IT. the milky way is actually SO gorgeous

[saturniandragon]

23 years old and I just made the connection that people on the northern hemisphere have a different view of the moon than people on the southern hemisphere.

[saturniandragon]

[bomberqueen17]

I was a whole like, 40ish years old when I went to the equatorial region for the first time. My North American ass went to Colombia and first off, could not fuckin handle the fact that while it felt like summer (80-90F, humid), the sun went down on the dot of 6pm every night and rose at 6am every morning. There I was at 7pm fully beliving it was midnight, because it was both dark and hot. Like, I'm used to early dark! but it's cold when it's dark early! I could NOT handle it.

And then, there in the dark, pitch-midnight-summer-black at 7pm, up pops this lovely crescent moon and it is

fucking SIDEWAYS

i had NEVER EVER EVER realized, despite knowing my whole life that the moon is a spherical object rotating around Earth, also a spherical object, that it would be at different angles from different spots on Earth.

It's the MOON! How can it be DIFFERENT! My poor patient partner drew me a diagram and I was like listen I know all of that but I cannot actually handle it. Nobody warned me the moon looks different.

So yeah my feeble mind was BLOWN, all y'all world travelers/residents can laugh at me now. Knowing it is one thing, experiencing it is something else, and I did NOT see it coming.

[sciphonpylon]

there is something poetic about days being blue and sunsets/rises being red on Earth, the blue planet, and it being the other way around on Mars, the red planet