#astronomy thoughts

[eclipse-astro]

really hate when mainstream astronomy journalism does this

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saturns-rings-disappear-from-view-march-23-2025-nasa-expert-says/

this entire article feels like it's written from the perspective of a space skeptic getting confirmation from nasa that it's real

even in the title, they say "nasa says" like the new york times says "palestinians say"

the entire article would come off so much better if any of this (correct!) info was said with like 1% confidence in it, it legit feels like they intentionally included the "nasa says" parts to feed into pseudoscience. it comes off so horribly to anyone with some knowledge of astronomy

"Saturn's rings will seemingly disappear from view in 2025" the addition of "seemingly" here is totally unnecessary and only adds more apparent skepticism from the author (and by extension, the reader)

"Saturn won't actually lose its rings in 2025, but they will go edge-on, meaning they will be essentially invisible to earthlings, NASA confirmed to CBS News." correct info, but adding "nasa confirmed" instantly makes us think this was just a random theory before nasa told them that it's true, when it is not by any means a random theory

the article gets noticeably more scientific as it goes on, which makes it even worse that they put the most clickbaity skeptical stuff in the headline and opening paragraphs

it perpetuates the weird idea that info about astronomy in particular is like, sacred to people that are in the field, and can't be reported on without contacting 5 people at nasa to confirm it in your article

it's so wrong because most stuff about basic astronomy is totally definitive and can be predicted 100% of the time using basic math, we shouldn't need top scientists at nasa to confirm that there's a full moon coming up on the day the moon will be full (something i have actually seen happen!)

and overall, it also perpetuates the general stigma on astronomy as somehow harder or more complex than most other fields, something that average person can't get into and that's reserved for genius level intellects

not great stuff cbs!

[justalittlelogophile]

Rewrite

Maybe instead of asking if somebody is ok

We can ask something along the lines of

“What weighs on you today?”

“What gravitates to your center?” “What has eclipsed in your life thus far?”

Many of us have stories to tell

We often just require the right question

To grant the permission for it be written

~Po

[eclipse-astro]

i'm guessing most of you know what the constellation orion is. and i'm guessing most of you picture it like this

a pretty basic constellation. a few of you may know that the middle "star" in the sword is actually the orion nebula, or that betelgeuse is the orange star at the top and may go supernova sometime in the near future

yet there is so much more in this constellation than what your eyes can see, even from the darkest sky.

this is what orion 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 looks like, with all of its innumerable and insanely vibrant nebulosity!

now onto some highlights:

firstly, the great orion nebula of course (along with its smaller twin, the running man nebula on the left) [image by Vishva Patel]

and here's a closeup: hubble's majestic shot of it taken in 2004-2005

the next main attraction here is a double viewing:

the flame nebula and the horsehead nebula, both next to the star alnitak. the flame is the brighter of the two, while the horsehead is mostly an H-alpha object

another hubble close up, the horsehead in infrared, taken in 2013

these three make up the main bright nebulae of orion, but there's still more faint stuff to be seen

namely, barnards loop; the large H-alpha emission surrounding orion's belt and sword

and secondly, the lambda orionis ring:

a large molecular cloud, also seen mostly in H-alpha

before we leave, there's one more sight to see slightly outside of the formal constellation itself

the very faint but incredibly beautiful witch head nebula!

coming to a close, i hope this post gave some insight onto just how much awesome stuff there can be in an otherwise innocuous patch of sky.

our universe is just full to the brim with really cool stuff everywhere

[eclipse-astro]

light pollution has many, many bad effects but i've noticed everyone really seems to like avoiding the main one, purely because it's slightly less tangible and physical to most people and doesn't have immediate quantifiable effects

most of society not being able to see stars/nebulae/the milky way/etc by naked eye is unquestionably the absolute worst effect of LP.

most of the good things in all of human history would not have happened if we were not all able to do astronomy by eye (and eventually by telescope). culturally, scientifically, socially, astronomy is pretty much one of the only singular things every single society on earth wholeheartedly embraced from the beginning of human history.

taking this away from Most Humans (and eventually all humans) will have and is already having innumerable known and unknown bad effects. i'd argue it's an essential component of the human experience.

when you take away astronomy, you take away context of your and everyone else's place in the universe. you take away the possible futures of millions of people that may have become scientists and researchers if they had been able to see the stars.

the pictures throughout this post are approximately how the night sky looked, everywhere on earth, for about 99% of human history.

depriving 𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 of humans from this is nothing less than a crime against humanity.

[eclipse-astro]

jupiter, at 3 different levels of magnification

firstly, a shot from my phone camera from last year- essentially no magnification. just looks like a bright star here.

second level: a shot from my nikon camera at 300mm with a telephoto lens. you can just barely see jupiter's moons here, the little dots in a line around it. no detail on jupiter yet, still too small.

and finally, two shots through my 8 inch dobsonian telescope (using phone camera), at 1200mm. pretty much equivalent to the longest telephoto lens you can get.

at this focal length detail like the larger/more prominent cloud bands and great red spot are visible (can't see the spot here since it was on the other side of jupiter when i took the photo), along with the moons being very easily visible if you expose for them (hence why there's two photos here)

soon i plan on getting a real planetary camera, and will probably get a 2x barlow along with it, letting me get far higher quality images at double the focal length (2400mm or so)

will reblog this and update it when that happens !! stay tuned

(edit: just realized jupiter won't be visible again until june at the earliest. unless i get it very very soon and get a shot before it goes away you may have to stay tuned for a little while)

[eclipse-astro]

doing the semi weekly astronomypost boosting

seeing an uptick from last time i checked

keep looking up

[eclipse-astro]

these are some pictures i took, of a nebula and a comet. all taken with the same equipment.

i'm going to let you guys guess what i took them with.

have something in mind?

does it look like either of these?

or maybe even, this?

i'm guessing you pictured a telescope of some kind, because the majority of people assume that astrophotography is the domain of a telescope.

they could not be more wrong.

i took those photos with this:

yea, a standard nikon camera (though with a different lens than the one pictured here)

astrophotography, specifically deep space astrophotography (most nebulae, some galaxies, and large star clusters; what you think of when someone says astrophotography), is the domain of cameras.

and inversely, large telescopes with more "zoom" are typically used to take pictures of things closest to us: planets.

i took all of these with a telescope like that last big one shown above.

astrophotography is incredibly accessible despite what a lot of people think; even with a 16 year old canon dslr and kit lens, i've taken photos like this

with a camera that costs less than half of what the average smartphone costs, you can take photos of things that are more than a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) miles away.

that cluster on the right in particular, is over 2 quadrillion miles away.

[eclipse-astro]

thought a little about how phones could be if we normalized astronomy more and there are so many cool options

imagine if you could open up your lock screen and it automatically was able to show the phase and position of the moon

imagine if every phone had a built-in full scale sky simulator (i imagine this would be by far the best sky simulator created, if it had the backing of a huge company like apple or samsung)

imagine if you could point your camera at a star or planet and the camera would automatically identify (this shouldn’t be too hard, if the phone has location and positional data) that star or planet and then give pictures and information about it

imagine if when you open your camera app and point the phone at the sky, the phone (at night) automatically showed that sky simulator overlayed on the sky in real-time with the full sky simulator controls (changing time, seeing how the sky looked previously and how it will look)

imagine if you could put your phone on a telescope adapter and set the camera on a telescope mode where it optimizes the camera for astrophotography (planetary, lunar, basic deep space, the works)

imagine if when you pointed your camera at the moon instead of overlaying a fake texture it just gave info about the rise and set times, current phase, distance from earth, etc- all with visual aids overlayed right on the live camera!

there’s an insane amount of potential here for Really Cool Sci-fi Stuff that we just. collectively decided not to explore?

this is probably true for literally any specific topic, if you know about any and have ideas feel free to reblog them or comment them or tag them or whatever you’re supposed to do here