Link to the available report by ESO: https://www.eso.org/public/videos/potw2643a/

Study: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ae9763

A rocky lava planet once thought to be too extreme to have an atmosphere appears to be wrapped in one with a reflective layer of vaporized silicate mineral clouds, the same family of compounds that make up quartz and sand.

University of Waterloo Physics and Astronomy Professor Lisa Dang and collaborators used the James Webb Space Telescope(JWST) to observe the lava planet TOI-561 b for 37 hours, capturing nearly four complete trips of the planet around its star.

The paper, "A Highly Reflective Atmosphere on the Lava World TOI-561 b Revealed by JWST/NIRSpec Phase Curve," was published in The Astronomical Journal.

"We measured how the planet's brightness and heat changed throughout its orbit," says Dang.

"This technique, known as a phase curve, revealed that the planet reflects a significant amount of light from its star, and that heat is being redistributed around the planet instead of only on the sunlit side. Together, these point to the presence of an atmosphere."

Missed out on yesterday's full moon, (and probably today too) but still proud of this one from 28th September.

Captured using Nikon D5300, 300mm telephoto lens. 75 shots stacked on Autostakkert, best 72% on final stacking. This image is 100% zoomed and cropped to content, and some final touch in GIMP

This isn't my first attempt but this is the first time I used a decent tri-pod and software to stack and enhance the picture. Would love to capture Moon with a telescope to create the Mineral Moon. Appreciate any advice on how do I go on achieving that.

Stacked image processed from multiple evenings.

Skywatcher 72 ED DS Pro
Astromodified Canon 700d
Guided on an EQ mount

I'm new to using telescopes, and this is my first photo of Moon with my smartphone. It feels like a life achievement to capture such a clean look of Moon

(I lowered the brightness when the Moon was too bright and used a telescope adapter for smartphone)

Not every plan goes to plan. Sometimes technology goes haywire and I wake up to find my telescope pointing at the ground with wires snagged. Sometimes the meridian flip doesn’t work and I gather no data. Focuser doesn’t work, guiding flies off the handle. So many variables. In this instance it didn’t centre on the target. This was my second imaging session of the night. Still gathered something worth processing. 2.5hrs on the Rosette Nebula from my rooftop in Toronto under bortle 8 skies. Next time will hopefully be better. Still happy with the results though. Clear skies everyone.

30x300s lights
Calibration frames
Gain 100
Cooled to -5

Gear: Svbony 122mm apo, zwo 2600mc pro, ragdoll 17 pro, Optolong L-Ultimate, zwo guide cam & scope, zwo Asiair, zwo eaf.

Stacked in Astro Pixel Processor. Processed in Pixinsight. DBE, D Crop, blur x, noise x, stat stretch, star x, narrowband norm, range mask, curves transformation. Further editing in photoshop.

Centaurus A is a giant galaxy with a powerful jet of particles extending tens of thousands of light-years into space. This galaxy helps astronomers study how supermassive black holes affect their surroundings.

Source:- https://science.nasa.gov/missions/chandra/galactic-gems-glisten-in-new-gallery-from-nasas-chandra/

Nighttime lights of Toronto, Canada are a patchwork of white and warm LEDs in a classic North American grid design. To the southwest, the airport blacks out a large area and an approaching cloud blurs the edge. The Great Lakes coastline is large and ocean-like in appearance! I took this photo on Expedition 72 to the ISS during an orbital pass over region.

More space photography can be seen on my twitter and Instagram, astro_pettit

Elon Musk says "cooling is actually much easier in space than it is on earth," and a big part of SpaceX's roughly $2 trillion IPO pitch rests on putting AI data centers in orbit. So I went to the blackboard to check whether this holds up. In this video I work through the physics of orbital data centers using nothing more than high school physics: how much solar power you can actually collect in space, where all the heat from the GPUs goes, and why the vacuum of space is a lot more like a thermos than a refrigerator.

We start with the case for space data centers (constant sunlight, no water use, no waiting on the power grid) and some practical problems that don't usually make it into the pitch, like the fact that you can't swap out a failed GPU in orbit. Then we figure out how much solar panel area it takes to run a single AI server rack, a gigawatt data center, and the terawatt of AI compute Musk has talked about launching. After that we get into cooling: why space being "cold" doesn't mean space is good at cooling things, how radiation compares to still air, fans, and water cooling, how big a radiator one rack needs using the Stefan-Boltzmann law, and how that stacks up against the radiators on the International Space Station.

The short version: the physics doesn't make orbital data centers impossible, but it makes them a lot harder and more expensive than the pitch suggests. As a result, I'm very skeptical that this will be possible on the timescale being advertised (claims like space will be cheaper for AI in the next 2-3 years, 1 TW per year launched, etc.).

This was shot from my backyard using my 10” Meade scope and ASI2600mm pro.

Taken On Seestar S50 Using 8 Individual 45 Second Video Composites Stacked In Astroshader.

Hey everyone,

Thomas here. Working as a PostDoc on the Destiny+ Dust Analyzer (DDA) on board the future JAXA mission DESTINY+. The mission: 2 flybys, one at Apophis and one at Phaethon. My background: I worked on the ESA Rosetta mission and NASA's Cassini mission (on the Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) data. Yes I like dust).

Anyway, this community is pretty deep into space science, so my current public outreach work might bore some of you, since it is not going too deep into detail.

Anyway, besides astrophysics coding tutorials I want to establish a new way of simple space science animations for public outreach (using Python lol). I would like to share my first work, where I also added references to the individual scientific statements to be as precise as possible. And that's all in my free time (maybe I should sleep more).

Please let me know what you think. I am already planning to make a video on the "rotation limit of asteroids".

https://youtu.be/t5Ym6aPHxO8?is=5eQ06tylBE7WRCFq

Best,

Thomas