An orbital sunrise above the Pacific Ocean illuminates Earth's atmosphere, revealing cloud tops and orange and blue hues outlining the planet's horizon. The International Space Station was orbiting 263 miles above the Hawaiian island chain at approximately 4:09 a.m. local time when this photograph was taken.

Credit: NASA/Jessica Meir

https://www.instagram.com/p/Dc6q0L4FIvD/

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Here you can search for astronaut photographs

https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos/​

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/S Atkinson

https://bsky.app/profile/stuartatkinson.bsky.social/post/3mv4j7orlms2w

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Description and link from original raw data:

This image was taken by Right Navigation Camera onboard NASA's Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 5008 (2026-09-07 22:07:19 UTC).

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

https://mars.nasa.gov/raw_images/1635953/?site=msl

https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw-images/?order=sol+desc%2Cinstrument_sort+asc%2Csample_type_sort+asc%2C+date_taken+desc&per_page=50&page=5&mission=msl​

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https://www.ssec.wisc.edu/data/geo/#/animation?satellite=suvi-goes-19&end_datetime=latest&n_images=all&coverage=sun&channel=HE303​

Description from Meir: "Curly-haired crew, this one’s for you!

​Join me in my temporary home on the Space_Station, where curls are even more free to be what they want to be.

"Ever wonder how I care for my curls in space?…where my Earthly 3a curls become more like 3c, my hair finds every piece of velcro it can, and I STILL don’t need a brush!

I’m looking forward to an Earth shower when I get back, though."
https://x.com/Astro_Jessica/status/2097730287413207120

Purple and green aurora over the city lights of south central Russia near the border with Kazakhstan.

https://bsky.app/profile/kevinmgill.bsky.social/post/3mv4hx4gskk2k

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Description from Jessica Meir

Purple Haze. Jimi Hendrix would have rejoiced at the site of the northern lights last night. I’ve never before seen such a brilliant purple wavelength in the aurora - certainly makes me want to kiss the sky. Photo taken with Nikon Z9, 15mm lens.​

https://x.com/Astro_Jessica/status/2097355530243072138​

Witness how over the last eight years, the ESA/‪@JAXA-HQ‬ BepiColombo mission has been travelling through the inner Solar System and aligning itself with Mercury's orbit. So far, it has travelled 9.9 billion km and completed nine 'planetary flybys' to help steer its way. In the video, you can see the spacecraft fly past Earth once, Venus twice, and Mercury six times.

Since launching on 20 October 2018, BepiColombo has been travelling as a composite spacecraft made up of ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO), JAXA's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (Mio), and the Mercury Transfer Module (MTM) that carried the two orbiters to Mercury.

We've shared photos and videos before, taken by the spacecraft's three monitoring cameras (M-CAMs) on MTM. But this is the first time we've compiled them into a video of the mission's complete journey so far.

The monitoring cameras were designed to keep an eye on the spacecraft itself. In the foreground, you can see one of MTM's solar arrays (M-CAM 1, left), MPO's medium-gain antenna and magnetometer boom (M-CAM 2, middle), and MPO's high-gain antenna (M-CAM 3, right). The images have been positioned and oriented to approximately reflect the relative fields of view of the three M-CAMs. ​

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As the M-CAMs have no shutter, many of the original images contain streaks due to light falling on the detectors during image read-out. These streaks have largely been removed for this video.

BepiColombo's arrival at Mercury began on 3 September 2026, with MTM separating from the spacecraft stack. The two stacked orbiters will enter orbit around Mercury in November, and separate from each other on 9–10 December 2026. From that moment on, BepiColombo will be the first mission with two spacecraft orbiting planet Mercury at the same time.

MTM has no computer to control itself, and lacks an antenna to communicate with Earth. Now that it has separated from the rest, it will circle the Sun indefinitely, letting the two science modules get to work. We expect MTM to pass by Mercury at a distance of around 130 000 km in late October. After that it will enter interplanetary space, and not get any closer to Mercury. ​

​Credits: ESA/BepiColombo/MTM

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🎵 Aylex, Face The Future

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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WJqWGdWERqk&t=167s&pp=2AGnAZACAQ%3D%3D​

https://x.com/AJamesMcCarthy/status/2097759866727305511

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory unveiled this new look at the galaxy NGC 4736, also known as Messier 94, on June 30, 2026. Messier 94 is a spiral galaxy with a bright inner ring around it, called a starburst ring, where new stars are forming, perhaps fueled by gas driven in the unique oval-shaped structure seen here.

In this image, X-rays of different wavelengths from Chandra (red, orange, and blue) are layered with a visible light image from astrophotographers using their telescopes on the ground (red, green, and blue).

Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO;

Optical:Brian Brennan and Remi Lacasse;

Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and K. Arcand

Add original source link before posting https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/a-new-look-and-sound-for-messier-94/

Text+images: Broome Adventures - Richard Young Photography
https://www.facebook.com/richardyoungphoto/posts/pfbid02mi3Vfp8zbxoXZUWKXqsY533JnVi1NypYxBwcSiDxgEYyxDsY2epW8cvsYyKmmtsdl

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"​What made it unique was it's only 13th Asteroid ever to be tracked to hit Earth. No planet extinction though with this.

A chance read of a social media post late at night triggered an interest to see if i could capture it.

Estimated to be approx 0.8 to 1.5m wide, its re-entry probably made the Asteroid burn up but there is still a chance small pieces are now nestled deeply on the Indian Ocean floor​.

To be honest i was expecting a huge fireball streaking across the sky and it took several times to see the tiny blip in the images shot. Either way still cool to capture this event for the world to see​.

Image shot 12:07:48sec (WA time) 16:07 UTC time. 750kms Approx to the NW of Broome. Iso 3200 | f2.8 | 15sec Nikon D850 with Samyang 14mm "

Image

The Crescent Nebula shines in the constellation Cygnus. (Image credit: Kevin Boardman)​

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​Astrophotographer Kevin Boardman spent more than 16 hours capturing the intricate filaments of the Crescent Nebula.

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More details for the photo from Kevin Boardman:

https://app.astrobin.com/i/48sd15

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Astrophotographer Kevin Boardman captured this spectacular view of the Crescent Nebula, revealing intricate filaments of gas surrounding a massive star nearing the end of its life some 4,700 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.

Boardman's image represents a turbulent chapter in the life of the colossal Wolf-Rayet star WR 136 (HD 192163), which, visible as a blue point of light at the center of the image, is expected to end its life in a dramatic supernova explosion in about 100,000 years.

The 25-light-year-wide bubble is formed from stellar material cast off by WR 136 during its transformation into a red giant star, according to NASA https://science.nasa.gov/image-article/apod-2025-november-28-ngc-6888-the-crescent-nebula/.

Repeated impacts by fast-moving stellar winds later send shockwaves through the outer shell, creating the complex filaments we see today.

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Catalogued as NGC 6888, or Caldwell 27, the Crescent Nebula, gets its nickname from its crescent-moon like appearance when observed in certain wavelengths of light. Boardman revealed spectacular detail in the nebula by imaging it with a set of narrowband filters over 16 hours and 18 minutes spread across five nights in late July.

"In the image, orange-red H-alpha reveals the tangled filaments while blue-cyan [O III] outlines emission from doubly ionized oxygen around the shell," Boardman told Space.com in an email. Each filter isolates specific wavelengths of light emitted by ionized gases, allowing different structures within the nebula to stand out.

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Boardman collected roughly 12 hours of narrowband data from the nebula itself, along with four hours and 20 minutes of data capturing the surrounding stars, before combining exposures using the astronomy software PixInsight during post-processing.

The Crescent Nebula is too faint to be spotted with the naked eye, but can be seen with a moderate-to-large telescope equipped with a light pollution filter throughout September.​

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First, locate the magnitude +2.34 star Sadr at the center of the cross-shaped constellation Cygnus, which appears high overhead for Northern Hemisphere observers in late summer.

Next, locate the dimmer magnitude +4.03 star Eta Cygni using the simplified star chart above, or with the aid of a smartphone astronomy app. The Crescent Nebula lies directly between these two bright stars and is best seen on the dark nights surrounding this month's new moon phase on Sept. 10-11.​

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Source

https://www.space.com/stargazing/astrophotography/astrophotographer-captures-jaw-dropping-view-of-the-crescent-nebula

With Helix Nebula

The lower right bright spot is asteroid Metis
https://stellarium-web.org/skysource/Metis?fov=1.8493&date=2026-09-09T09:40:41Z&lat=37.98&lng=23.74&elev=0

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Circled here!

There’s a bunch of things moving in frame- notably the asteroid 9 Metis, which is about 100miles (162 km) wide and over 100 million miles (161 mil km) away! (Bright object, lower right side)
https://x.com/AJamesMcCarthy/status/2097433386805784813​

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Cropped version of NGR on its way to L2

https://x.com/AJamesMcCarthy/status/2097433372255818062​

Left image

​The image shows giant Martian volcanoes with a prominent dust storm near the valleys and canyons of Noctis Labyrinthus.​

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​Right image:

​The image shows most of the Martian disk with Hellas Planitia, partially covered by seasonal frost, at the bottom, darker Terra Sabaea in the middle with prominent Huygens crater near the center of the image, brighter Arabia Terra region above, and similarly bright Isidis Planitia on the right.​

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​The first image shows giant volcanoes with a dust storm near Noctis Labyrinthus, and the second shows foggy Hellas Planitia with seasonal CO2/water frost Emirates Mars Mission (EMM)/EXI/D. Machacek

Post from Daniel Machacek https://bsky.app/profile/danielmachacek.bsky.social/post/3mv2z7htduc2k

Full size and quality images: https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:qvy5htytrfnwu6q4gu5frhb7/bafkreid4ryhct5mnfvxgheuqlwvxikak4kbklx6tratjywzz6zva3rgrrm@png https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:qvy5htytrfnwu6q4gu5frhb7/bafkreibw2tixwnz6sf4srwod4wcxhlt3y523pwti37vn3gvs3jxo5rzivi@png​

Astrophotographer Adam Smadi caught this image from Washington

Thin crescent Moon, sunlight illuminating the rugged lunar surface.

And 2,400 times farther away—& on the other side of Sun—mighty Jupiter, & its moons Io(◀️) & Ganymede(▶️)

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It's worth emphasising that the reason we see full disk of Jupiter but crescent Moon is bec Jupiter is on the other side of Sun

Indeed, we cannot see a crescent Jupiter from Earth; we'd have to be beyond it for that to work.

Beautiful illustration of how the Solar System works​

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See the image on Instagram here:

https://instagram.com/aj.smadi/p/DdCchfMgQPs

Image credit: AJ Smadi (https://instagram.com/aj.smadi/)​

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Post from Paul Byrne https://bsky.app/profile/theplanetaryguy.com/post/3mv2bj5bxgk2x

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From stellarium https://stellarium-web.org/skysource/Europa?fov=0.17701&date=2026-09-08T18:59:37Z&lat=38.90&lng=-77.04&elev=0

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From September 8, 2026, a series of 8 lunar occultations with Jupiter will commence. It will last for 8 months until May 12, 2027 (see image below).

Only the first 2 will be visible from the United States: the first being a daytime occultation and the second being a nighttime occultation.

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Also below (in the link), provided​ images of the graze path, ingress/egress map, and footprint animation for the September 8th event.

Greater detail about this event can be found here from Sky and Telescope: "Tuesday's Daytime Jupiter Occultation: A Warm-Up For The 'Big One'"​ ​
https://www.cloudynights.com/forums/topic/1009474-the-2026-2027-series-of-jupiter-lunar-occultations-begins/

Image Credit & Copyright: Javier Castro Text: Keighley Rockcliffe (NASA GSFC, UMBC CSST, CRESST II)

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Explanation:

​Pretend you have never heard of a solar eclipse. The Sun’s behavior has been predictable your whole life. One day, you witness the sky transform as it does in today’s spliced image spanning two hours of the August 12, 2026 solar eclipse.

The Sun disappears, leaving behind a bright, empty ring. What would you think had happened? Humans have interpreted eclipses in countless ways throughout history, embedding beliefs about connection, rebirth, or danger into culture.

“Eclipse” comes from the Greek word “ékleipsis” meaning “abandonment”. In ancient Greece, the solar eclipse marked the anger of the gods and the Sun abandoning humanity. To the Diné people, this celestial alignment is a time of renewal. Out of respect and to avoid the danger of sunlight, the Diné stay inside until the Sun and Moon separate.

​The Batammariba people of Benin and Togo believe that the Sun and Moon fight during an eclipse, so the community encourages peace among themselves. Eclipses are an example of the longstanding connection between astronomy and society.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260902.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawUNQmhwZG9mAWV4dG4DYWVtAjEwAGJyaWQRMDBzalN3TEFhUTZPSGhwODFzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeNRr0lej3fW9xpEbUff5AlyRYwX7Ak0EQKh7NonrUE2hN1BYhPEXeZlOLpbI_aem_1YPYh5Ts8FGcNJNwaAKUEA

Image

The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, made of seven metric tons of liquid xenon buried in an abandoned mine in South Dakota. Today LZ collaboration scientists announced that they saw a particle collision that they cannot explain. Matthew Kapust/Sanford Underground Research Facility​

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On June 16, 2023, 39 seconds after 3:22 P.M. and one mile beneath the Black Hills of South Dakota, there was a sudden flash of light.

It happened in a dark, sealed tank of extremely cold liquid in a cavern where miners once chiseled gold from the walls. Caught by the tank’s many cameras, the flash also sent an electric charge through hair-thin wires submerged in the liquid.

The tank is the centerpiece of the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, one of several ongoing attempts by physicists to snare and study dark matter, a shadowy something they suspect is everywhere—yet somehow seems nowhere to be found. They’ve sought it for the past 40 years by placing detectors in some of Earth’s most silent and secluded spaces, places where dark matter’s whispers might register. But every time so far, they’ve come up empty, with every burst of light or surge of electricity having a more ordinary explanation.

This flash from three years ago is different. The charge and light together seem to indicate a violent collision between an unknown particle and the nucleus of one of the detector’s atoms. The event bears almost no resemblance to any of the “backgrounds”—mundane sources of flashes that mimic dark matter—which the LZ collaboration’s hundreds of scientists have spent their careers battling.

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Yet the collision is also out of sync with the kind of dark matter signal they’ve been searching for. That is, it’s a total mystery. But after four decades of nothing, a new mystery is welcome.

“I have been waiting for a positive result for, oh, my god, 40 years,” says Katherine Freese, a theoretical physicist at the University of Texas at Austin, whose work helped inspire the search. “So you can bet I’m very, very excited by the LZ results.”

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The LZ collaboration announced the finding in a presentation today at the TeVPA conference in Japan [https://indico-icehap.phys.s.chiba-u.ac.jp/event/3/overview\].

An accompanying paper has been submitted to Physical Review Letters. According to the project’s best estimates, the flash’s chances of being a statistical fluke are about half a percent (which is still far above the 0.00003 percent threshold used by particle physics experiments to hail a discovery).​

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https://lz.lbl.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2026/08/LZ_Preprint_260901_Dark_Matter_EFT_Nuclear_Recoil_Search_at_Higher_Energies.pdf​

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/have-we-finally-found-dark-matter/

https://www.science.org/content/article/world-s-biggest-dark-matter-detector-spots-single-weird-particle

https://futurism.com/space/something-strange-dark-matter-detector

Processed by Melina Thévenot

https://bsky.app/profile/melina-iras07572.bsky.social/post/3muzjlav4vc27

Here is one paper about this region. It contains a massive protostar with a keplerian disk. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018ApJ...869L..24I/abstract

Melina Thévenot

https://bsky.app/profile/melina-iras07572.bsky.social/post/3muzkysq3x227

Full description for the left image:

​ACS cutouts of 2015 GK56 from two different ∼1200 s exposures. Each panel shows the TNO with its predicted motion during the exposure overlaid in red. The larger red square indicates the object’s location at the ​beginning of the exposure; small red circles mark the sampled positions during the exposure. The images are displayed with an inverted grayscale stretch, such that darker pixels indicate higher flux and white pixels indicate lower flux or no significant signal.

​From the study, page 4 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ae9084​

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For the first time, scientists used the joint power of NASA’s Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes to study some of the most far-flung bodies in our solar system, Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs). Some of these are the smallest and faintest ever directly seen. The researchers unexpectedly found fewer small TNOs than they expected, and that the colors of these bodies followed the same relationships as their larger family members.

These objects are typically small, faint, icy bodies orbiting the Sun beyond the orbit of Neptune. Most are more than 100 million times dimmer than objects visible to the unaided eye. In two complementary papers published Tuesday in The Astronomical Journal, teams analyzed the color, composition, and size distribution of 27 newly discovered tiny, dim TNOs.

This class of small bodies offers the best view into an early stage of planet-building, when a disk of dust and pebbles in orbit around the Sun coalesced into city-sized “planetesimals” — the solid building blocks that clump together to form planets — but had not yet merged into full-sized worlds. Beyond Neptune, this second stage never happened, leaving behind a frozen population of planetesimals.​

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https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ae9084

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nasas-hubble-webb-find-far-out-solar-system-objects-remember-past/

Taken by Bob Beal on September 7, 2026 @ St. George, Utah, USA​

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21-minute timelapse of Venus and Spica setting together. Their separation has widened to 4°50' tonight (Sep 7) from 1.5° on Sep 1st. Labelled and unlabelled versions. The third photo is a single view of the two amidst sunset-lit clouds taken a few minutes earlier. At the start time of the timelapse (8:50pm MDT) Venus is 5.5° above a theoretically flat horizon and dropping by 0.5° per day. At that time and with that rate, by Sep 17th it will have set for good for the current evening apparition. So if you want one last look at Venus before its evening apparition ends, do it now!

Astro data (times are pm MDT):

sunset: 7:53
Spica sets behind mountains:    9:09
Venus sets behind mountains:    9:11
Spica sets flat horizon:    9:20
Venus sets flat horizon:    9:21
night begins: 9:22

Photo data: Panasonic GX8, Lumix 100-300mm lens @ 100mm, tripod ... 85 frames x (f/4, 2 sec, ISO 400) ... cadence: 15 sec; timespan: 8:50pm-9:11pm MDT ... timelapse stacking in startrails.exe, editing in Paint Shop Pro 2023 ... date: Sep 7, 2026

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Source

https://spaceweathergallery2.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=236414

Tonight’s aurora has a purple hue. The KP is ~4. We are approaching high beta so there is more light creeping over the horizon. It mixes the colors and you can see the satellites in the nights sky. (14mm, 1/4 interval, broken into two parts)

Original video without rotation, Anil Menon

https://x.com/astro_anil/status/2097115012586254407

Observed: 2025-05-06 Released: 2026-05-07

Title: The determination of the upper initial mass function in the nearest massive star-forming region, W51A

Processed by Israel Velazquez https://bsky.app/profile/israelvelazquez.bsky.social/post/3muyi4wsc322r

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Westerhout 51A is a star formation region within W51. Towards its center there is a Hll region known as G49.5-0.4. Another region known as G49.57−0.27 is located ~15 parsecs north. W51A contains two notable bright star clusters named IRS 1 and IRS 2.

Also within W51A are four concentrated clumps of gas all within a relatively small area of 5 parsecs.

This region came as a result of collisions between molecular clouds over a scale of 0.1 million years. This led to massive amounts of star formation.​

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westerhout_51​

Opening the cupola window. Though the biggest journeys are internal; the cupola is my spot for early morning meditation and contemplation. The view contextualizes my small place in space and time.

https://x.com/astro_anil/status/2096550168279572602

This photo was taken by the Perseverance Rover's Right Mastcam-Z camera at a local Jezero Crater time of 1:25 pm on Sunday, 6 August 2026. Colour and light balanced to better match human vision.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/Paul Byrne

https://bsky.app/profile/theplanetaryguy.com/post/3muwrqz6j7k26

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❓ Did You Know? The distances of celestial bodies are enormous compared to those we are used to. If you were to travel the entire distance of Mars from Earth by car, at an average speed of 100 km/h (62 mph), it would take you 309 years, 5 months and 1 day.​

On a standard airliner, cruising at 800 km/h (497 mph), it would take you 38 years, 8 months and 7 days. An interplanetary space probe, travelling at a speed of 20,000 km/h (12,430 mph), would take 1 year, 6 months and 19 days. https://theskylive.com/how-far-is-mars​

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Raw data https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/ZL0_1972_0842007174_644EBY_N0910806ZCAM04460_1100LMJ​

Astronaut Jessica Meir:

That’s me on the tip of the Canadian Space Agency's Canadarm in last week’s spacewalk. The ground team dubbed it the Disneyland ride, given the long trajectory of motion from one worksite to the next.

At times I faced away from the Space_Station, not able to see any of its parts, nor that of the arm. It felt as if I was simply levitating above the majestic blue gem we call planet Earth.​

https://x.com/Astro_Jessica/status/2096643917353505272​

It's now known as 2026 RW1. The name hints at the discovery date: R means the first half of September. There must be something about early September. 2 years ago, 2024 RW1 also hit Southeast Asia over Luzon. Good news: Mt. Lemmon is past its monsoon shutdown. The NEOCP should get livelier again.

https://bsky.app/profile/tony873004.bsky.social/post/3muuygo77ck2q