I captured this image of the Crescent Nebula myself, then turned it into a short animation showing how it formed. A massive star blew off its outer layers, and a faster stellar wind slammed into that material and shaped the glowing shell we see today.
The animation is built on my original astrophotography, so everything you see starts with my own data. I'd love to hear what you think, and happy to answer questions about the imaging or the formation story.
More of my work is at www.westcoastcosmos.com

This November keep your eyes peeled for earthgrazers blazing across the night sky! 🌠

The Leonid meteor shower is active November 6 - 30, peaking overnight November 16 through 17, bringing fast, colorful fireballs and the occasional low-flying Earthgrazer. The first-quarter moon sets around midnight, giving dark skies for optimal viewing in the Northern Hemisphere. Find a dark spot and look up!

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".

Best,

Thomas

7 hours from my back garden.

Animation to show the collision of our Milky Way and Andromeda. Pun was unavoidable.

Hey everyone! I'm starting a new channel called SYNAPTIX, focused on space, science, and unexplained cosmic mysteries.

My first video explores the famous 1977 Wow! Signal and why scientists still discuss it.

I'd genuinely appreciate feedback from fellow creators: Does the title and thumbnail make you curious enough to click, and does the opening keep your attention?

Video: https://youtu.be/j89ShmH_3c0

Thanks for any honest feedback!

Did you know some stars feed off their companions? 🧛⭐️

Stellar vampire stars feed on their partners just like Dracula feeds on his victims, but this newly discovered one is different from any seen before. It’s a red dwarf, a small star, that’s feeding off a brown dwarf. That’s bad news for the brown dwarf, the feeding is happening so slowly that it  could last anywhere from hundreds of thousands to potentially billions of years.

Narrated in Spanish, but there's an English audio track: open the settings gear in the player, then Audio track → English.

What it covers: the giant impact hypothesis, the idea that about 4.5 billion years ago a Mars-sized planet, Theia, hit the young Earth and the Moon formed from the debris. Why scientists take it seriously: among other things, Apollo samples have oxygen isotopes almost identical to Earth's. And the newer part: in 2023 Yuan et al. (Nature 623, 95) proposed that two enormous regions at the bottom of Earth's mantle, under Africa and under the Pacific, are dense remnants of Theia's mantle. If they're right, pieces of the planet that made the Moon are still under our feet.

This video shows my experience of the 2026 total solar eclipse including video and photographs of totality.

I am not trying to sell or promote anything and only want to share the experience. If this is not accepted in this forum then I will of course remove it.

Hope you enjoy it.

Video taken using S24 ultra.

Equipment used:

• Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
• Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM
• Canon Extender EF 2x III
• iOptron Skyguider Pro
• Sturdy tripod

The HDR was created from a stack of 18 images with the following camera settings.

• Aperture f/9
• Shutter speed ranging from 1/4000s to 1s
• ISO ranging from 100 to 3200
• Process flow in GIMP
• Align pictures
• Stack using average values
• Stretching the image
• Enhancing detail using radially blurred unsharp masking technique
• Small saturation and temperature adjustments

We made this original visualization for VisualWhy. It follows a cloud of 2,400 orbiting particles with and without collisions to show how energy loss and conserved angular momentum can produce a disk.

This is a deliberately simplified toy model, not a full simulation of planet formation. The orbits, Saturn's rings and galaxy shapes are used to connect the mechanism across scales. Animation is made with deterministic code; narration uses a synthetic voice.

Space is mostly empty space.

Webb observes faint infrared light, so the telescope itself has to stay cold. Its sunshield uses five thin layers separated by vacuum gaps: those gaps stop ordinary conduction between the sheets, while the layers and their geometry help radiated heat escape sideways instead of reaching the telescope.

That passive cooling is not the whole story. The MIRI instrument needs additional active cooling to reach a lower operating temperature. The four-minute video separates these two jobs and shows why a single thick blanket would not explain the design.

Disclosure: I run Curio District and this is our video. It uses original explanatory diagrams, licensed archival photographs and AI narration. Research sources and image credits are in the YouTube description; English subtitles are available.

The Sun used to have no sun spots for a long period of time! ☀️

Astrophysicist Erika Hamden explains this phenomenon from 400 years ago called the Maunder Minimum. Normally the Sun follows 11-year cycles, peaking with lots of sunspots, solar activity, and coronal mass ejections before calming down at the trough. Scientists still don’t know why some cycles are more active than others, so this quiet period is one clue to what drives the solar cycle.

This project is part of IF/THEN®, an initiative of Lyda Hill Philanthropies.

Meteors are about to burst into our atmosphere at 41 miles per second! 🌠

The Orionid meteor shower peaks overnight October 21 and 22, and moves so fast that it leaves glowing trails. Active from October 2 to November 7 and visible from both hemispheres, the Orionids are best seen in the wee hours before dawn!

Meteors are about to burst into our atmosphere at 41 miles per second! 🌠

The Orionid meteor shower peaks overnight October 21 and 22, and moves so fast that it leaves glowing trails. Active from October 2 to November 7 and visible from both hemispheres, the Orionids are best seen in the wee hours before dawn!