View allAll Photos Tagged SOLARSYSTEM
Astronomical seeing was pretty decent when I captured the Jupiter data for the image immediately proceeding this one. My optics were starting to dew over, to I replaced the front cover, waited for an hour and found that the dew heater had completely dried the front glass on my SCT. I slewed to Mars and found that astronomical seeing had dramatically worsened. Being at the telescope and ready for another capture, I did 10 iRGB runs of 45s per filter at gain 400. In processing I found the B channel completely unuseable and the G channel not much better. I tried combining the colors anyway, and the image barely looked like Mars. The R channel, captured in IR, looked pretty decent, so I salvaged what I could.
ZWO ASI290MM/EFW 8 x 1.25"
TeleVue NP101is/2.5x PowerMate
Losmandy G11
About 20,000 frames per filter x 10 RGB runs captured with FireCapture
Best 60% stacked in Autostakkert
Wavelet sharpened in Registax
Finished in Photoshop
Probably my last view of comet C/2021A1 (Leonard). Schlepped out to Goose Pond Fish & Wildlife area in Greene County, Ind., a dark site with low horizons on a cold but crystal evening. The comet was very low by the time it got dark enough to emerge from the twilight so it appears redder than when higher in the sky. But I got enough exposures, to show some detail in the tail and coma. This is a composite, processed twice: registered on the comet and separately registered on the stars, combined in Photoshop.
30 15 sec. exposures, Explore Scientific 102mm f/7 refractor, ZWO ASI294MC camera, UV/IR cut filter, iOptron CEM25P mount, ASIAir Pro controller, processed in Astro Pixel Processor, Lightroom and Photoshop.
#cometleonard, #astrophotography
While the flights of the RSS Pale Blue Dot and the RSS Mote of Dust provided successful proof of concept that hyperspace travel was possible, their ventures within the Solar system never truly achieved what the final goal was: faster-than-light travel. That honor was reserved for the RSS Hedy Lamarr that embarked on a 4-and-a-half-Month-40-light-years-round trip to the Trappist-1 System (solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/335/10-things-all-about-trappis...) in 2361, gathering a plethora of valuable data during a close flyby.
The picture was taken immediately after the return of the ship, with the crew of mission specialist Roswitha Sternberger of Austria (center) and the renown veterans of the hyperspace programme, science officer Dr. Stellan Fuente of Mexico (left) and mission commander Lt Col Inga Starstrøm-Marsden of Sweden (right) being welcomed by family on the landing pad at Boca Chica Spaceport.
Behind the scenes:
It did take me forever to build that follow-up on the RSS Pale Blue Dot (flic.kr/s/aHskHoPuG3) and the RSS Mote of Dust (flic.kr/s/aHskUJZMn8). There were a number of attempts and iterations, most were never photographed, some were photographed but remained unpublished. Real spaceships are built much much quicker in Boca Chica that’s for sure ;-)
Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000): Austrian-American inventor who’s work laid the foundation for frequency hopping and the revolution in data transfer that shaped the the late 20th and early 21st century. (www.forbes.com/sites/shivaunefield/2018/02/28/hedy-lamarr... )
Concept design was strongly influenced by …
„Mars Colonialization“ by Stephane Chasseloup
www.artstation.com/artwork/z6KAd
National Geographic „Deadalus“ Spaceship by Oscar Cafaro
www.artstation.com/artwork/V3RxZ
Flag of Planet Earth: www.flagofplanetearth.com
Solar System images taken since June 2013 with a QHY5L-II (various telescopes, see links for each)
Left to right, Crescent Moon, Venus, Saturn, Jupiter(w/ moons), Solar Prominence
Moon-Never posted
Venus 12/3/13 www.flickr.com/photos/astrochuck/11199662244/
Saturn 6/15/13- www.flickr.com/photos/astrochuck/9048472290/
Jupiter 10/21/13 - www.flickr.com/photos/astrochuck/10401774336/
Solar Prominence 7/26/13 (taken from animation) www.flickr.com/photos/astrochuck/9371266613/
images not to scale,
Waxing Gibbous Moon at 61.9%. 300 frames capturing using a QHY163 mono camera attached to an Altair Wave 115ED scope. Captured using SharpCap Pro and edited using Autostakkert2 and Registax6.
ZWO ASI290MM/EFW 8 x 1.25" (IR: 1 x 90s)
Meade LX850 (12" f/8)/TeleVue 2.5x PowerMate
Losmandy G11
One 90s IR run (1.1ms, gain 400, histogram 74%, 502 fps, 45,244 frames) captured in Firecapture.
Best 60% of frames stacked in Autostakkert
Wavelet sharpened in Registax
Finished in Photoshop
#TeleVue #PowerMate
#Meade
#Losmandy
#ZWO
#Mars
#Syrtis Major
#Planet
#Solar System
#Hellas
#Lucky Imaging
His birthday party theme was our solar system.
Cake decorations included the sun, jupiter, saturn, mars, and earth.
Sydney, Australia (Sunday 23 Sep 2018)
Sunlight filtering through the branches and leaves of a tree form eclipse images on the wall. No camera? No problem.
Moon taken by a remote telescope.
Process/crop
Capture date : 2025
Shooting parameters : I telescope
Processing: Thomas Thomopoulos
Image credit : I Telescope / Thomas Thomopoulos
Mars through a small refractor with 360mm focal length and 2x Barlow.
William Optics Zenithstar61
Skywatcher AZ-GTI mount
ZWO ASI224MC- camera
(30sec avi-file in Raw8-format, gain200, 3847 frames)
...best 10% stacked in AS!3
Moon taken by a remote telescope.
Process/crop
Capture date : 2025
Shooting parameters : I telescope
Processing: Thomas Thomopoulos
Image credit : I Telescope / Thomas Thomopoulos
تصويري لكوكب #المشتري والقمر #أوروبا
#my_astrophotography
#Jupiter and it's #Europa moon
تم التصوير باستخدام التليسكوب:
Taken by:
Telescope 🔭
Celestron CPC 800
وباستخدام الكاميرا:
And with the camera:
ZWO ASI290MC
2x Barlow Lens
تم التكديس والمعالجة باستخدام:
Stacked using:
Autostakkert
Registax
Photoshop
Created in Apophysis 2.08Beta. Edited with Fractalius.
Playing with a different script. Kind of made me think of solar flares off the Sun.
Crescent Moon on February 24th 2023. Today my astronomy club in Maryland - Howard Astronomical League - lost one of its longtime members and former Presidents Bob Prokop. Bob was a great admirer of the Moon and knew it like the back of his hand. In memory of Bob when I got home tonight I took this image of theMoon. Taken with a Meade 12" LX200 scope and Canon T7i camera.
Haha ... I wish !
Of all the places in our solar system , this is the one I am most curious about .
Europa , icy moon of Jupiter ... there is a strong belief that there is an ocean under that ice and therefore the potential for life ( like giant sea cucumbers maybe ... one can dream ... )
There was a show about Europa on TV .
Click !! ... and with the help of NASA and my trusted Moulinex for special effects , voila ! ;-)
Something Violently Shook the Surface of Mars. It Came From Space.
Scientists thought the InSight spacecraft had recorded some major marsquakes, but with another NASA mission’s help, they found what had really shaken up the red planet.
Cinemagraph
An animation using data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter depicting a flyover of an impact crater on Mars that was made on Dec. 24, 2021 by a meteoroid impact. White flecks of water ice surround the crater. Animation by NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona.
Kenneth Chang
By Kenneth Chang
Oct. 27, 2022
On Christmas Eve last year, Mars shook.
The exquisitely sensitive seismometer on NASA’s InSight lander dutifully recorded the burst of seismic vibrations and then dispatched the data, a gift of science, to Earth the next day.
The InSight scientists were busy celebrating the holidays. When they studied the tremor in detail in early January, it looked different from the more than 1,000 marsquakes that the stationary spacecraft had recorded during its mission to study the insides of the red planet.
“It was clearly a seismic event, and it was a big seismic event,” said Mark Panning, the project scientist for the InSight mission. “And we were excited about it right away.”
In scientific papers published Thursday, scientists using data from two NASA spacecraft reveal that the seismic event was not the cracking of rocks from the internal stresses of the red planet. Instead, it was shock waves emanating from a space rock hitting Mars. The discovery will help scientists better understand what is inside Mars and serves as a reminder that just like Earth, Mars gets whacked by meteors too.
Mars lacks plate tectonics, the sliding of pieces of the crust that shapes the surface of Earth. But marsquakes occur nonetheless, driven by other tectonic stresses like the shrinking and cracking of the red planet’s crust as it cools. The largest marsquakes are modest by Earth standards.
The December shaking registered as among the most powerful that had been recorded, at a magnitude of 4. But it did not occur in the tectonically active region where most of the bigger quakes have been observed.
Most crucially, the Christmas Eve seismic event was the first time that surface waves — vibrations traveling along the outer crust of rocks at the surface of Mars — had been detected. For all of the other marsquakes, InSight’s seismometer had only observed what are known as body waves, vibrations traveling through the planet’s interior.
That the epicenter was not close — more than 2,000 miles from InSight — added to the mystery. That suggested a quake that was not only large but shallow.
“It was difficult to determine why we had surface waves,” said Philippe Lognonné, a professor at the University of Paris who serves as the principal investigator for the seismometer.
This remained a mystery until two months later when scientists on a different NASA spacecraft — the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — discovered that this seismic event was not a marsquake after all.
It was instead the thunk of a space rock hitting Mars.
It was not a tiny space rock either, estimated at somewhere between 15 and 40 feet in diameter, said Liliya Posiolova, the orbital science operations lead at Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, which built and operates two of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter cameras.
The impact released the energy equivalent to somewhere between 2.5 and 10 kilotons of TNT, Dr. Posiolova said. (The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II was the equivalent of 15 kilotons of TNT.) It left a crater wider than a football field.
During a NASA news conference on Thursday, Ingrid Daubar, a planetary scientist at Brown University who leads InSight’s impact science working group, said a meteor this big enters Earth’s atmosphere about once a year.
“We see those pretty regularly,” Dr. Daubar said. “But because Earth has a thicker atmosphere, asteroids of this size burn up and are generally pretty harmless.”
Scientists including Dr. Panning, Dr. Lognonné, Dr. Posiolova and Dr. Daubar reported the findings in two articles published on Thursday in the journal Science.
When InSight — a shortening of Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport — landed in November 2018, scientists expected to observe not only marsquakes but also a few meteor impacts a year. Instead, for more than three years, they saw no meteor strikes at all in the seismic data.
That indicated a shortcoming in their knowledge of the Martian crust and in the computer models simulating expected seismic signals.
Last month, scientists reported identifying four small meteor strikes within a couple hundred miles of InSight based on chirps of sound as rocks entered the Martian atmosphere.
Now, they also know of larger meteor strikes farther away.
In early February, Dr. Posiolova and other scientists were working to take a three-dimensional, stereo image of a part of Mars. They already had one image of the region from a few years ago, and now they were taking a second image from a slightly different angle.
But the second image included a big blotch, a blast zone of disturbed dust radiating outward more than 10 miles that had not been in the first image.
It was so big that it was visible in daily global weather images taken by another camera on the orbiter. “Then we pretty much start marching back from that February image,” said Dr. Posiolova, the lead author of one of the Science papers.
The blotch was present on Dec. 25. But not on Dec. 24.
She said she remembered in the back of her mind that InSight had recorded one of its bigger seismic events on Christmas Eve. “It was like, ‘Could this be it?’” she said.
It was.
Higher-resolution images showed that the meteor carved a crater about 500 feet wide at the center of the blast zone and even kicked up water ice from below the surface. That is the closest to the Martian equator that ice has ever been spotted.
Now that they had definitively identified the seismic signals from a meteor impact, the InSight scientists went back through their data to see if any earlier marsquakes were actually meteor impacts.
Indeed, the shaking of a magnitude-4.2 seismic event three months earlier, on Sept. 18, looked similar. So the orbiter’s cameras looked around that epicenter, located about 4,600 miles from InSight, and spotted a crater there about 426 feet in diameter.
Dr. Posiolova said these were, by far, the two largest new craters that the orbiter has spotted during its 16 years studying Mars. The two impacts are unlikely to be related, Dr. Panning said; that they occurred only a few months apart was lucky, random chance.
Connecting the seismic signals with freshly carved craters offers a sharper view of the planet’s internal structure. Dr. Lognonné likened it to a movie. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter provided the images while InSight recordings are the soundtrack.
“You are able to better understand the movie than with just the sound or just the picture,” he said.
Dr. Lognonné said the current models work well for the crust of Mars, but not as well for the deep mantle. “This is unique data to get more information on the interior of Mars,” he said.
One of the possible surprises is that the surface waves appear to be traveling at roughly the same speed through the crust of the northern hemisphere as the southern hemisphere.
The topography of the northern half of Mars — what may have once been covered by an ocean — is much lower than the southern highlands. But the velocity data suggests the crustal rocks in both hemispheres are of similar density. On Earth, the crust beneath of the oceans is denser than the crust of the continents.
“We are beginning to sort of uncover the mystery of this dichotomy,” said Doyeon Kim, a planetary scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and the lead author of the Science paper describing the InSight findings.
The Science papers are the latest findings from a busy year for the InSight mission even as the spacecraft is dying because of dust piling up on its solar panels, cutting off its energy supply.
During the NASA news conference, Bruce Banerdt, the InSight mission’s principal investigator, said that the expectation was that the spacecraft would fall silent in the next four to eight weeks. “That’s a sad thing to contemplate,” he said.
A regional dust storm in the southern hemisphere did not directly pass over InSight, but it did kick up more dust into the atmosphere that eventually settled on the solar panels, further reducing the power output, Dr. Banerdt said.
“We had cut off the seismometer for a few weeks,” he said. “We’re now operating the seismometer again, only one day out of four at this point to conserve our power. But even at that relatively small amount of use, the batteries are still slowly being depleted.”
In another paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy on Thursday, scientists used InSight’s seismic data to study Cerberus Fossae, a highly fractured, 750-mile-long region where most of the seismic rumblings of Mars originate.
Heat from magma from a volcanic region to the west is heating the crust there, said Simon C. Stähler, a seismologist also at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and lead author of the Nature Astronomy paper.
“You are basically causing this weakening, this local weakening, which allows quakes to happen,” he said.
The InSight scientists are also studying a magnitude-4.7 marsquake in May, the largest detected during the mission. That one appears to be an actual marsquake, because no crater has been seen near the epicenter, which lies close to Cerberus Fossae.
Once InSight shuts down, there again will not be any seismometers operating elsewhere in the solar system. But a spare seismometer built for InSight is being modified to be sent to the far side of the moon in a few years, and NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, will also carry a seismometer.
“Planetary seismology is an ongoing field,” Dr. Panning said.
Kenneth Chang has been at The Times since 2000, writing about physics, geology, chemistry, and the planets. Before becoming a science writer, he was a graduate student whose research involved the control of chaos. @kchangnyt
Aberkenfig, South Wales
Lat +51.542 Long -3.593
Skywatcher 254mm Newtonian Reflector, Tal 3x Barlow Lens, ZWO ASI 120MC Astronomical Imaging Camera.
Captured using Firecapture
FPS (avg.)=17
Shutter=57.95ms
Gain=68 (68%)
Brightness=7
Apparent diameter at time of capture 3·73"
Processed with Registax 6 & G.I.M.P.
Seeing Conditions: Reasonably good.
Out of 7000 frames captured, 1900 used for processing. Final image enlarged by 175%
Mars on April 27th now at a tiny size of 4.7 arcsec. Dark surface feature in the south is Mare Sirenum and if you zoom in you can see a dark feature at about the 3:30 position at the edge. This is the edge of Valles Marineris which I was surprised I was able to resolve, The northern polar hood is visible in up top with the dark feature below being Arcadia.
46P/Wirtanen is a periodic comet, discovered in 1948, by the American astronomer Carl Wirtanen. It is will make its closest approach eight days after this image was taken, on 16th December 2018, as it makes its way out almost as far as Jupiter’s orbit.
I was still suffering from the unreliable alignment of my SkyWatcher EQ6-R mount and had to manually locate the object.
Well…… to be honest, I found it with the guidance of my friend John Rombi, who patiently aimed his laser pointer at the target while I battled with the controls, using my red dot finder from an unnatural position somewhere in the tangle of cables below my ‘scope.
Object Details:
Comet 46P/Wirtanen
Constellation: Eridanus.
Visual magnitude: +4.2, brightening.
Actual diameter of nucleus: 1 km
Actual diameter of coma: tbc
Period, 5.4 years.
Distance: 0.09 AU or 13.7 million km (for a comet, that’s close!)
Altitude: 59°.
Tail: not seen.
Image:
Exposure: total 19 minutes over 25 frames.
Date: 2018-12-08.
Location: The Oaks, NSW.
Sky: semi-dark rural.
Cloud: no.
Moon: no.
Image acquisition software: SharpCap.
Image post-processing: PIPP; Deep Sky Stacker > GIMP.
Cropping: slight.
Gear:
Imaging telescope: Skywatcher Esprit 120ED Super APO triplet refractor.
Focal length: 840 mm, focal ratio: f/7.
Telescope mount: SkyWatcher EQ6-R.
Optical: field flattener yes; filter no.
Imaging camera: ZWO ASI 071 MC Pro.
Polar aligning method: QHYCCD PoleMaster.
Polar alignment error: 1′ 42″ (Synscan).
Guiding: none.
SharpCap Camera Settings:
[ZWO ASI071MC Pro]
Pan=0
Tilt=0
Output Format=PNG files (*.png)
Binning=1
Capture Area=4944×3284
Colour Space=RGB24
Hardware Binning=Off
Turbo USB=80(Auto)
Flip=None
Frame Rate Limit=Maximum
Gain=337
Exposure=45.767742
Timestamp Frames=Off
White Bal (B)=61(Auto)
White Bal (R)=59(Auto)
Brightness=72
Temperature=-12.9
Cooler Power=100
Target Temperature=-15
Cooler=On
Auto Exp Max Gain=300
Auto Exp Max Exp M S=30000
Auto Exp Target Brightness=100
Mono Bin=Off
Anti Dew Heater=On
Banding Threshold=35
Banding Suppression=0
Apply Flat=None
Subtract Dark=C:\Users\Roger\Desktop\SharpCap Captures\darks\ZWO ASI071MC Pro\RGB24@4944×3284\13.4s\gain_503\dark_5_frames_-14.1C_2018-12-07T11_17_24.fits
#Black Point
Display Black Point=0
#MidTone Point
Display MidTone Point=0.5
#White Point
Display White Point=1
TimeStamp=2018-12-08T11:47:34.3748894Z
SharpCapVersion=3.2.5871.0
TotalExposure(s)=1144.19355
StackedFrames=25
Observing Notes:
Another test night for the EQ6R, following eleven months of unreliability. It failed to align again, with an errot of over 5° and will be returned to the manufacturer for the third time.
Taken a few weeks after this year's opposition. Very chuffed with this one!
Skywatcher 400P Dobsonian
ZWO ASI178MM
Baader IR-Pass filter + RGB
2x Barlow
Stacked in AutoStakkert!
Processed in Registax
Assembled in Photoshop and Lightroom
Jupiter and Europa. Taken using a QHY IMG132E, attached to a Altair Wave 115 ED Triplet Refractor with a Tele Vue 2 x Powermate to increase magnification. It is the result of 500 images, stacked using AutoStakkert 2 and processed using RegiStax 6.
تصويري لكوكب #المشتري والقمر #أوروبا
#my_astrophotography
#Jupiter and it's #Europa moon
تم التصوير باستخدام التليسكوب:
Taken by:
Telescope 🔭
Celestron CPC 800
وباستخدام الكاميرا:
And with the camera:
ZWO ASI290MC
2x Barlow Lens
تم التكديس والمعالجة باستخدام:
Stacked using:
Autostakkert
Registax
Photoshop
This is one of a series of images taken by the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission on 8 January 2025 as the spacecraft sped by for its sixth and final gravity assist manoeuvre at the planet. After flying over the planet's north pole, the spacecraft had clear views of Mercury's sunlit northern hemisphere.
Monitoring camera 1 (M-CAM 1) took this photo at 07:12 CET, when the spacecraft was about 1427 km from the planet’s surface. The spacecraft’s closest approach of 295 km took place on the planet's night side at 06:59 CET.
The image shows that large regions of Mercury's heavily cratered surface are smoothed over by lava from volcanic eruptions.
This smoothing over is visible inside the 290 km-wide crater at the right of the image, called Mendelssohn. While its outer rim is still visible, it has been largely filled by the same smooth material that makes up the surrounding plains. Smaller, more recent impact craters dot the otherwise smooth crater.
The vast plains surrounding Mendelssohn, called Borealis Planitia, were formed by the widespread eruption of runny lava some 3.7 billion years ago. The volume of lava making up Borealis Planitia is similar in scale to mass extinction-level volcanic events recorded in Earth’s history, notably the mass extinction event at the end of the Permian period 252 million years ago. Borealis Planitia is bordered by older and hence more heavily cratered terrain.
An old M-CAM favourite, the 1500 km-diameter Caloris basin, appears in the lower left portion of the globe. This is Mercury's largest well-preserved impact structure, and one of the largest in the Solar System. The impact that created it left scars on Mercury's surface up to thousands of kilometres away.
Deep troughs point outwards from the basin's edge, possibly formed by high-speed debris from the Caloris impact scouring the surface. Some of them host relatively bright lava, which looks similar to both the lava on the floor of the Caloris basin and the lava of Borealis Planitia further to the north.
But which way did the lava flow: into the basin, or outwards? We don’t yet know, and this is one of Mercury’s many mysteries that BepiColombo hopes to solve. The foreground of the image shows BepiColombo's solar array (centre right), and a part of the Mercury Transfer Module (lower left).
[Technical details: This image of Mercury's surface was taken by M-CAM 1 onboard the Mercury Transfer Module (part of the BepiColombo spacecraft), using an exposure time of 4 milliseconss. Taken from a distance of around 1427 km, the surface resolution in this photograph is around 1500 m/pixel. The image has been lightly processed to largely remove instrumental effects due to camera readout without a shutter. The image's brightness and contrast have also been adjusted.]
[Image description: Planet Mercury in the background with its grey, cratered, pockmarked surface. In the foreground are some spacecraft parts.]
Credits: ESA/BepiColombo/MTM; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
First image of Jupiter obtained last evening. Red spot is crossing Jupiter`s disk. Managed to get a few images in a window before the next Atlantic depression made its presence felt. Now blowing a gale!
Perhaps the best of the recent series of mediocre images. I had to combine two images in WinJUPOS to improve things a little, which meant having to erase one of the two resulting Io shadows. This was also affected by smoke, doubling exposure times and making the original captures orange. Glad I could still get a nice colour balance in the final result.
Jupiter was magnitude -2.83 with angular diameter of 48.6".
Aberkenfig, South Wales
Lat +51.542 Long -3.593
Obtained using a 254mm Skywatcher Newtonian, Tal 2x Barlow Lens & ZWO ASI 120MC Astronomical Imaging Camera.
Captured using Sharpcap.
Processed with Registax 6 & G.I.M.P.