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."

For decades, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has helped astronomers measure how fast the universe is expanding. But as those measurements have become more precise, scientists have uncovered a cosmic mystery: the universe appears to be expanding at different rates depending on how we measure it.

Known as the Hubble tension, this discrepancy challenges our understanding of the cosmos and could point toward something missing from our current model of the universe.

In this video, NASA scientists Jennifer Wiseman and Julie McEnery explore how Hubble helped transform our understanding of cosmic expansion, the mysterious role of dark energy, and how NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help investigate some of the biggest unanswered questions in cosmology.

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.

Victus Haze is a US Space Force exercise in rendezvous and proximity operations: getting one satellite up close to another, quickly. It has two players about 500 km up in the same sun-synchronous orbit. Jackal, built by True Anomaly, launched on 3 May. Puma, built by Rocket Lab, launched on 19 June on an Electron with under 17 hours' notice.

My tracker logs orbit changes and close approaches from Space-Track's public orbit data. On 22 and 23 October it logged three small burns by Jackal. Since then the distance between the two at each daily check has gone 189 km, 83, 54, 69, 47.

The clearer sign is speed. The tracker forecasts each close pass and re-runs the forecast with every orbit update. On 23 October it predicted passes of about 2 km at 11 to 14 metres a second. By 24 October that had slowed to 7.6 m/s, by 26 October to 3.5 m/s. The latest forecast puts the next close point at 12:41 UTC on 27 October, about 2.3 km apart at 3.4 m/s, roughly jogging pace. Two satellites matching speeds like that is what a rendezvous looks like from the outside.

The log also shows bursts of large orbit changes by Puma in late July and at the end of August. Public reporting describes a July sortie and a later one in which Puma manoeuvred to evade, though the Space Force hasn't confirmed the second.

Caveats: public orbit data updates a few times a day and is good to about a kilometre at this height. Anything closer than that, or a burn between updates, won't show. The pair's page has the full forecast history: https://overhead24.com/proximity/69012-69646

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

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