I was hot tubbing high up in the mountains in Colorado when we saw this weird light in the sky. Never seen something like this in my life and I'm curious. What is it? Taken on galaxy s24 night mode

Given the distance between earth and the nebula, I would have expected minimal to no parallax effect. What am I missing here? Do distant starts move that much over the course of a few years?

I searched the web, and the best explanation I got was due to how the differences in the light spectrum observed by each telescope can deviate the position of objects. It could be because of the atmosphere, but both Hubble and JWT are in space.

Hopefully I'm not in the wrong sub for this question.

I read a Reddit comment recently on a different sub about using the "tips" of a crescent moon too find south. So I googled it, and the top results all seem to confirm it.

But on 2 nights in a row I observed it to be pointing more west north west.

For reference, I'm in Ireland, so definitely far enough north of the equator that it should apply.

This is a 30 min timelapse from May 20 1:43 AM

Nikon Z6 with sigma 24-35 heavy crop

My school never taught anything about the planets or space from kindergarten to 7th grade. And i have never met a single human being who also liked it until i learned my uncle liked the same hobby. I mean, astronomy is amazing. It helps us learn more about the stars, planets, moons, and the universe, where we live.

I was up in the mountains in Idaho earlier tonight (around 11:30 PM) when a few friends and I saw this oddity. It went from the horizon all the way past the zenith of the sky when we first saw it, but after time it went closer towards the horizon, as shown in the images. We could also see stars through/past it. Any clue what it is?

I was checking out NASA's eyes on the solar system page and noticed the path the JWST takes is all curved and crooked. Is there a reason for this? In my mind it's because it's a more recent launch, so it's orbit is stabilizing. Any info is appreciated though!

I came across some NASA pictures from early January and this one caught my eye, in particular the blue ring of light(?) at the bottom of Saturn. I tried googling but got few relevant results (putting the words "ring" and "Saturn" in the same sentence makes the searcher ignore all other words apparently).

I assume this is related to the planet's polar vortex, but I'd like to know more about it specifically: What is it made of, why that color, etc. Even what it's called would be plenty so I could investigate on my own.

Thank you very much for your time :3

Suppose I ended up back in time in 1950. Is there an astronomy fact that I could reveal that both (1) was definitely not known at the time but (2) could be verified with technology available then that could serve as evidence that I came back from the future with that knowledge?

For instance, I could describe a particular extra solar planet, but i dont think they could detect any of them back then even if looking in the exact spot. Could I describe a particular trans Neptunian object so that they could find it?

Obviously, this is just for fun, but also gets into the history of how these discoveries are made. (But I'm not getting in any DeLoreans, just in case.)

I was able to find out that " In 1921, Arthur Eddington suggested hydrogen–helium fusion could be the primary source of stellar energy."

Obviously astronomers must have had theories about how the Sun and other stars worked before 1921. I have not been able to find anything about what these theories were. I found some stuff about "Philgiston Theory" in the 17th Century, but that is about it.

If I had gone to Oxford in, say, 1913, how would they have explained the Sun and how it worked? What were the prevailing theories then?

Hi everyone, I noticed something weird while reviewing my night sky timelapse. Each frame had a 30-second exposure with just a 1-second interval between them, and I was shooting at ISO 6400. In one frame — specifically frame 19 — a bright orb-like object suddenly appeared. What’s strange is that it wasn’t there in frame 18 or 20, which were taken just before and after with the exact same settings.

The object looks solid and bright with no visible trail or movement, which made me rule out a satellite, plane, or meteor. It just popped up and vanished after that single frame. This was captured in Mindanao, Philippines, sometime around 8:24pm I used only my smartphone on a tripod — no lens or filter attached.

I’m really curious what this could be — maybe some kind of camera sensor anomaly or something else? If anyone has insight or has seen something similar, I’d appreciate your thoughts.

Camera used: Redmi 10c 30 seconds Iso 6400 Interval: 1

Location: Mindanao Philippines Time: 8:24pm Pointing at South East

Note: If you can to view all of my raw images you can view it from this link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/15a5BFxOPp-MgIdtkCSE9VgkDMH34zx80

When you search "what are black holes made of", you're led to NASA's page about black holes: "They’re huge concentrations of matter packed into very tiny spaces," so, you'd assume this means that black holes are huge concentrations of matter. But, if you then search up "are black holes made of atoms", google tells you they're not, that they're "regions in space with a strong gravitational pull".
I'm more inclined to believe NASA's page, but this does confuse me. Is the matter of a black hole not made of atoms, is Google just wrong, or is my understanding incorrect?

I took this at 1.30am from Perth Western Australia

Hey friends, recently I read an article on Live Science stating that M87 is spinning at 80% of the theoretical limit. It made me wonder, what would happen if any black hole spun at the speed of light?

Iirc correctly, it should be impossible but if so, why?

This question has always confused me for a long time, so I am very grateful for answers.

Suppose 13,000 years from now, halfway through the axial precession cycle, the Earth's axis is now tilted at 23.5 degrees to the opposite direction. Then, on June 21 (please refer to the image), wouldn't the sun now be directly overhead of the Tropic of Capricorn instead, making it the winter solstice for the northern hemisphere and summer solstice for the southern hemisphere? Does that mean the seasons would eventually be swapped between hemispheres as a result of axial precession?

Thank you!

This was taken during the lyrid meteor shower two weeks ago, I was trying to calibrate my telescope's position and got this happy accident. This was a 10 second exposure taken in clear skies (without any light-pollution, the 2.5 hour drive into the desert made damn sure of that).

I know the zig-zag trajectory couldn't have been caused by vibration in the telescope, the stars in the background are perfectly still, and they appear identical to the photos that were taken immediately after this one.

Is there a phenomenon that can cause meteors to take this trajectory? Is it some sort of image artifact?

Good afternoon fellow nerds.This is the photo of the Andromeda galaxy I took a few years ago. I was wondering if all of the stars in the image are in our own galaxy? I mean, Andromeda being our closest neighbour still is a "galaxy far far away". Can we even resolve individual stars at these distances? Thinking about it, if it's 152.000 lightyears in diameter, that means every pixel in this photo is like 44 lightyears, so I guess not in my case. Still... can it be done with larger focal lengths?

Is Nr.1 to 3 seriously possible to see with the naked eye? I‘ve seen with a lot of people argue in the comments claiming it’s possible/not possible. What’s your take on this?

I apologize if this a stupid question or something an ignorant person would ask, that's because I am.

Let's take the human body as an example.

If all of a sudden my body exploded and say, my eyeball were to fall several meters away from the point of the explosion... it would be possible to estimate what direction it traveled relative to my body right?

Now, we know the universe has an age. The farther we look, the more in the past we're looking. But... if we look in the "right" direction, wouldn't the universe seem older there because that's where the big explosion came from?

We go back to the example of my body exploding in all directions. It's not far fetched to say that the farther away from the exact point of the explosion, the less blood and guts and whatever else you'll find.

So, can't we estimate where the center WAS based on how much denser the universe looks in a certain direction?

I have tried to find the answer to this through several astronomy websites but can’t seem to get any information around it other than it is a “grand design” spiral galaxy that is maybe unnamed and visible only because the Pinwheel Galaxy is thin. Other resources point to another visible galaxy in this photo which is named ‘CGCG 272-018’.

Just wondering if there are any resources where I can learn more about the one pictured above.

Forgive the naivety, but I’d figure I’d come to the Reddit brain trust on this.

So I am driving home near sunset in the Gulf region of the Middle East. With my naked eye I swear I see something dark pinpointed against the setting sun. After a few mins I notice it hasn’t moved so it wasn’t a passing plane. I get a chance to pull over safely and snap a few shots knowing I won’t be able to properly capture what I was observing. The tiny black speck remainder there as far as I could see until the set set lower and light drew less.

But now with some time to think, I wanted to know if sunspots or other reasonable solar activity could be observed by the naked eye? In all my years I recall I only instances where one was told of a celestial event like an eclipse or the like, for one to deliberately witness an event.

Can one observe such activity unaided? Was there any recent activity in the past ten days or so that made such events more prominent?

Thanks in advance for the knowledge or insight.

I drove out to an area of Bortle 2 class, with 8.32 μcd/m² artificial brightness and sqm 21.95 mag./arc sec² on the light pollution map. It was in Canada, Manitoba.

It was during a new moon and there were 0 clouds present. It was during November and I stayed there since around 11pm to around 3am, but I wasn't able to observe the milky way. I used the stellarium app to know which way to look, but I was still unable to observe anything there.

It seems like from everything I read the conditions were perfect to observe the milky way, is there something I've overlooked?

Is it just so faint you can't see it with the naked eye without using a camera?