Stars / Astronomy / Astrophotography / Telescopes / Astro

The moon shifts a bit night on night, several moon widths.

Damn you orbital mechanics!

Andromeda, 31 x 10s/50mm/f1.8/ISO 800 and 27 x darks

I think I can make out the dust at the back there. But I feel like I'm failing to extract all of the detail in the processing (because I suck at it). Also a more recent camera would probably be a big help, this one is 10 years old. Also flat fields would remove that vignetting.

If anyone wants the raws or 32-bit stacked TIFF to have a crack at processing give me a shout.

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That is cool!

Not bad for a 10 year old DSLR/£50 lens/cheap tripod and 30 minutes work :)

proper picture(not taken by me):

Messier 32 is to the left of the center, Messier 110 is to the bottom-right of the center.

You can make out 110 in my image and a bit of the dusty stuff

Saturn sitting below a lovely crescent moon right now.

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Nips out to check....

cross post from photo comp thread :)

Do they point to celestial bodies?

Wish you were here ...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/nov/27/nasa-mars-insight-lander-sends-back-first-picture-from-red-planet

Neptune is a little blue dot a fraction of a degree below bright salmon Mars right now.

Info on the Geminids meteor shower - https://ukmeteornetwork.co.uk/news/geminid-meteor-shower-2018/

I find all this current research into the solar system very interesting:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/dec/17/farout-astronomers-identify-most-distant-known-object-in-solar-system

Saturn is losing it's Rings

I don't really understand why this is 'News'. It's a 100 million year timeline or why it's a problem ...

The sun would be 1/10000 the brightness as seen from Earth, making it largely indistinguishable from the background. And the 1000 year "year" would preset a real challenge to any would be astronomers out there...

Do you mean for putative astronomers on that object?

Yes, obviously it is probably held to our sun in a rather tenuous way--doesn't it just mean that it's more subject to our sun's gravity than to that of anything else (including a hypothesised large planet)?

Do we really have much of an idea what happens in the outer reaches of our/any solar system?

Anyway, came here to post this:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/dec/21/mars-express-beams-back-images-of-ice-filled-korolev-crater

Surely with this much water it's rather likely that there's life somewhere? Or does that always require liquid water? Lifeforms have already been found in such extreme conditions on Earth that there could well be similar ones on Mars?

Do you mean for putative astronomers on that object?

Indeed, There would a "main" star that slowly, over several generations, got lower or higher in the sky. There would be a night time set of stars and a daytime as well leading to a very directional and non isotropic cosmology. This could lead to some very interesting myth creation stories.

Do we really have much of an idea what happens in the outer reaches of our/any solar system?

Very little, there are no self-luminous objects out there even in the infra red. We can only really spot them by reflected light from the sun and that leads to a relative brightness of (1/10000)^2.

There are some interesting pictures of exo-solar systems via interferometry showing the formation of planets close to the host star.

I found the solar system hiding in a piece of wood.

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Anyone else see the big flash in the west sky about 10pm this evening? Possibly a meteorite according to twitter...

Saw a report of it about 25 minutes ago from an astronomer in South Wales.

Fireball : https://twitter.com/UKMeteorNetwork/status/1084935770719301632

Venus and Jupiter again in the south east. Apologies for poor quality snap - it is with a phone held up inside two layers of window.

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Is that Jupiter back? I blamed it on Mars.

Yep, he's back but feeling very low. Makes me want to move down under.