Saturn, Rhea and spokes 6th July RGB image from a nice session a few weeks ago, some strong ring spokes are on the near-right side on the B-ring. There's a nice storm in the southern mid-latitudes, south is up. Rhea is to the left. Celestron C14, ZWO ASI585MM, 22mins, taken from the Blue Mountains.

A reprocess from the archives - Saturn in June 2018 in excellent conditions, rings tilted well towards us, showing off a substantial polar storm, as well as good definition of four sides of Saturn's polar hexagon. 1/3

Homunculus Nebula expansion - 2008-2026. A sequence of three images, comparing my backyard C14 image with the two HST images (2008 and 2019). The nebula expands from 17" to 21" in diameter and details such as the hole in the 'near' bubble end and jet-like equatorial blasts consistently grow outwards

Homunculus Nebula in colour Well this came out better than I thought... Captured on Saturday in perfect seeing. Texture in the bubbles, faint outer details, all consistent with HST and Damian Peach's 2017 1m telescope shot. No funky/AI tools here. Maybe the sharpest amateur image of this one?

Just for fun, let me tell you about somebody you've probably never heard of, but who was once one of the most famous people in England, a national hero, a disgraced fraudster, and an astonishingly accomplished piratical maniac. He led quite a life. (1/53)

Any Sydney-based astronomers here? A team at Andalucia is coordinating an occultation campaign for one of Jupiter's small (2-5km) irregular moons, #Kallichore (a candidate for an #ESAJuice flyby) that'll be passing in front of a star at ~12:20UT on March 18th. opop.obspm.fr/media/data/c...

Helen MC@crystallised-cricket.com · 6mo ago

Every 4 years the reality of being married to a Scottish/Norwegian comes crashing down…. @deep-twilight.bsky.social

Day one of January Cricketpalooza - a net session with @deep-twilight.bsky.social, good to roll the arm over a bit.

Want to see the aurora? Tonight might be the night! There have been a bunch of coronal mass ejections (big flares of plasma) from the Sun that are all arriving at Earth today and tonight. theconversation.com/aurora-likel...

Aurora likely tonight as string of solar flares heads for Earth

Four big outbursts from the Sun mean skies may light up much further from the poles than usual.

theconversation.com

Submit them to Aurorasaurus!!! They're an NSF funded project out of University of New Mexico that takes crowdsourced aurora observations for research purposes: www.aurorasaurus.org

Aurorasaurus - Reporting Auroras from the Ground Up

Friends, see my real-time #aurora report on the aurorasaurus.org map! Follow us on www.facebook.com/aurorasaurus.org. Reporting #northernlights and #citizenscience from the ground up since 2012!

aurorasaurus.org

YES! THIS on GenAI! Please read this absolutely splendid piece of writing that had me cheering, a little bit weepy, and writing in the margins: "An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny."

Large Language Muddle | The Editors

The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the ...

nplusonemag.com

My social media manager for this one is Helen, but I'm pretty chuffed to win the Solar System category at the Malins for the third time in the last five years (move over Brisbane Lions, I'm doing back-to-back wins too 🤣). Congrats to the other winners and finalists too, some great images again

Helen MC@crystallised-cricket.com · 10mo ago

Proud of @deep-twilight.bsky.social, following his 2024 Solar System category win in the Malin awards (Australia's premier Astrophoto comp) with another in 2025. This time for a beaut sequence of Saturn through equinox.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin ✨ figured out what stars are made of ✨ when she was just 25. 🔭🧪 Her PhD thesis basically established the Harvard astro department — at a time when Harvard didn't officially allow woman students. I wrote this little profile to mark the 100th anniversary of her thesis:

How a Harvard maverick forever changed our concept of the stars

At just 25, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin applied quantum physics to a treasure trove of astronomical observations to show that stars are mostly hydrogen and helium.

sciencenews.org

Sarah Tuttle@niais.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Wait a minute. Why aren't we celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin's dissertation.

Three galaxies, aurora, mountains and clouds A timelapse from a recent trip to Glenorchy, NZ - beautiful dark skies and plenty to look at, with clouds bubbling off the Humboldt Range, broken enough to see the southern lights below the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds. EOS6Dii, 228 frames, 20s each

A great summary of the start of the #wncl cricket season by @crystallised-cricket.com . Who will be the breakout stars of 2025-26? I'm looking forward to finding out!

CRICKETher@crickether.com · 11mo ago

WNCL PREVIEW: A Great Season for New Stars to Shine by Helen Maynard-Casely @crystallised-cricket.com crickether.com/2025/09/24/w...

Two comets and Mars, 21st Sept C/2025 R2 (SWAN) is keeping pace with Mars, and fainter C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) is descending towards the Sun. Processing was interesting, correcting for three moving objects against the twilight starfield. Tonight, the Moon joins the party! EOS 6Dii, 35x1min, 300mm @ f/5.

In a UN speech today, President Trump said that "all of these [climate] predictions were wrong". Back in 2019 I led a research effort to digitize old climate model projections and assess how well they did. Turns out they got future warming pretty spot on!

A Galactic frame of reference What's your point of view? Does the Milky Way set, or does the Earth just get in the way? Been wanting to do this one for a while! ~6hrs, 30s per frame, EOS6Dii, Star Adventurer, Sigma 14-24mm. Processed in PixInsight & PS. #astrophotography #timelapse

Waxing Moon, 3rd Sept I was playing with camera focus and focal length points on the C14 - 585MM + focal reducer = 7 panel whole Moon mosaic, The full-size processed image is 90 megapixels. Hello, nearest neighbour! Full res view here: photos.app.goo.gl/J5pR2DJYiwrq...

A dusty MIlky Way snap from a short break at Turon Gates, NSW. 29x90s, EOS 6Dii @24mm, Star Adventurer, good skies. Antares region is below centre. #astronomy #astrophotography

Peter Rosén has created another great animation of #Jupiter's storms during the 2024/25 apparition, made from thousands of amateur observations and projected in a variety of different ways. Incredible amount of work must have gone into this #planetsci [Credit: P. Rosén] youtu.be/x1W_Ux_jgaE?...

2 Huge Storms have erupted on Jupiter

YouTube video by Peter R

youtu.be

You have been kidnapped and a character from the last tv show you watched is trying to rescue you. Who is coming to save you? Chances of survival... slim

“When the system forces you to code with a hallucinating clown, eventually you stop resisting. You let him type. You let him be "productive." You check out. You surrender your brain to the noise and just float.” deplet.ing/the-copilot-...

The Copilot Delusion

Disclaimer: This post was written May 2025, and the arguments apply to AI code capabilities at this time. The arguments around lack of competence are certainly likely to become less prevalent-while th...

deplet.ing

If your business model doesn’t work without breaking the law, then you’re not in business. You’re in organized crime.

The Verge@theverge.com · last yr.

Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry

Dust storm this morning, everything a bit hazy. Our periodic reminder there's a lot of desert away out west!

Sunrise on Saturn's rings 3 images 3rd-8th May (UT) - rings reappearing through Saturn's equinox on the 6th. First image shows the Sun/Earth-facing outer edge only, likely basically the F ring! (brightest equinox ring in Cassini 2009 data) Last image has south face of the rings illuminated again.

If you like then you better put a ring on it! 🪐 @deep-twilight.bsky.social got a really nice pic of #Saturn during the time when it’s ring system is pretty much edge on to our perspective. And a couple of Moons! Really like the colour of the equatorial and higher latitude belts.

Hidden rings, 3rd May You can see the rings in a longer-exposed, very heavily-stretched view! The ghostly rings are so faint just now that they are far outshone by 13.5mag Mimas (the fainter of the pair of moons on the left ansa). C14, ASI585MM, 6mins IR642nm. Sunrise on the rings is tomorrow...

Saturn, five moons, no rings What a strange planet! Tomorrow is Saturn's equinox, a rare good look without its famous ring system, far too faint to see in a normally-exposed image, silhouetted against Saturn. Dione, Rhea, Mimas, Tethys and Enceladus too. C14, ASI585MM, 15mins, 3rd May 19:54UT.

Saturn's hidden rings, 2nd May A snap of the dark side of Saturn's rings, only four days before Saturn's equinox. The silhouette of darkened rings cuts across the planet, and the full extent of the very faint rings themselves are in an overexposed and strongly stretched version. #astrophotography