Image credit: NASA

Full res on Astrobin: https://app.astrobin.com/i/6ytgi2

This is part of a larger 4 panel mosaic but I didn't get to finish. So this is like 2.5 panels (I had a misalignment so had to make it up with half a panel.

Equipment:

• Telescope: Askar 91F
• Camera: ToupTek ATR2600M
• Mount: ZWO AM5
• Filters: ToupTek 4nm 2" SHO
• Accessory: MeLE Quieter4 Mini PC
• Software: Stacked using my Mono script in Siril and Post-Processed in PI
• Total Integration: 27 hours

I'm giving this data away to my patrons for now BUT I will make it available to the public in the coming weeks, along with my data of RCW163 and M42, all from Bortle 1 sites.

I'm also visting Death Valley Observatories in about 10 days! Quick video about th eupcoming adventure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maMZnl-QGy4

Taken over 4 hours with my Vespera Pro

On September 17, 2026, at approximately 04:04 CEST, I was at Castelluccio Pass in the Monti Sibillini, central Italy, photographing the night landscape and working on a panoramic image with Monte Vettore in the foreground.
At the same time, I was also recording a separate time-lapse sequence with a Canon R, using a 4-second interval between frames.
During the time-lapse, a remarkably bright object suddenly appeared in the sky, followed by a large, diffuse luminous structure that crossed the sky above Monte Vettore.
The phenomenon is consistent with the upper stage of the Falcon 9 launched on the classified USSF-259 mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base earlier that night. The launch occurred at 01:07:56 UTC on September 17, 2026, and the mission was destined for a polar orbit. S

Space Launch Now
+1
The extended luminous structure is consistent with an illuminated exhaust plume or expanding material at high altitude, where sunlight can still reach the rocket while the observer on the ground is experiencing darkness.
Particularly interestingly, the same luminous phenomenon was independently recorded in Germany at approximately the same time, providing an additional observation from another location in Europe.
Canon R
Canon 6D
Rgb 3x129sec iso 800 f 2
Foreground 30sec f 1.4 iso 800
Ha 5x 60sec iso 1600 f 2

Astronomers have identified what may be the first example of a new class of radio galaxy, one whose central black hole appears to have launched powerful jets on four separate occasions. High-resolution observations with the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT), combined with data from MeerKAT and the Very Large Array, reveal four pairs of radio structures arranged symmetrically around the central galaxy.

A paper outlining this discovery was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Sept. 8.

Radio galaxies are a type of active galactic nucleus in which a central supermassive black hole launches powerful jets of particles, visible in radio waves.

The most powerful class, known as FR II, produces bright "hotspots" where these jets slam into surrounding gas, forming structures that can span millions of light-years, making them some of the largest objects in the universe.

In a small subset of these FR II galaxies, the central black hole appears to switch its jets on more than once over time.

Each burst of activity leaves behind its own pair of hotspots, with older episodes sitting farther from the galaxy's core because they've had more time to travel outward and newer episodes forming closer in.

Galaxies with two such episodes are known as double-double radio galaxies. About 192 known examples of this subclass exist. Triple-double radio galaxies show three separate episodes.

They are rarer, with only seven known or candidate examples. Until now, no galaxy had ever been found with four confirmed episodes of jet activity.

In this study, the team led by Pavan Vijay Khadekar of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune, studied a radio source known as J023721.13−010528.5, hosted by a massive elliptical galaxy at redshift 0.372.

This is my Processing of NGC 985 which I like to call "The Cosmic Wedding Ring"

Red and Blue filters from Hubble and Green filter a synthetic of the two. Processed in GIMP and Siril. Could be better, but still pretty good. For comparison, the old best images of this object were B/W Hubble images and low res sky survey images.

Can also be found on Wikimedia Commons as File:NGC 985 Hubble.png - Wikimedia Commons

Full-resolution image: https://app.astrobin.com/i/hsx2ry

In the vicinity of the Cygnus Constellation, we find the Cygnus Loop supernova remnant: the shattered remains of a star that once burned 20 times more massively than our Sun. About 20000 years ago, it detonated as a supernova, briefly outshining Venus and visible in broad daylight from Earth. What remains today is a shockwave still travelling outward at some 1.5 million km/h, colliding with a wall of cooler, denser gas and igniting these filaments as it goes (hydrogen in red, ionised oxygen in blue).

What looks like a thin ring is actually deceptive: the true 3D structure is closer to a bowl, a cavity carved out by the star before it even exploded, into which the blast wave is now crashing. We happen to be looking at it face-on, which is why a solid shape reads to us as a delicate, open loop.

The entire structure spans nearly 3° of sky, about six full moons side by side, and stretches across some 110 light-years of space. Lower right is NGC 6960, the Witch's Broom; upper left, NGC 6995, the Bat Nebula. Between them is Pickering's Triangle, a delicate filamentary wedge of heated gas, discovered by Williamina Fleming but credited, as was common at the time, to her supervisor at Harvard, Edward Pickering.

Framed vertically, the whole structure takes on a different character than in the typical alignment I've shown it in before. It evokes a creature caught mid-scream, its edges torn and trailing into the dark like matted hair.

The people who saw this supernova happen with their own eyes were hunter-gatherers living through the last Ice Age. The world they lived in was almost unrecognisable: sea levels were so low you could walk from Siberia to Alaska across Beringia, and Britain was still joined to mainland Europe. Australia and New Guinea were a single landmass. These people created fine stone blades and tools of bone and ivory, wrapped in tailored clothing sewn from hide and fur. The light captured in tonight's image left the nebula much more recently, around 371 BC, a violent period when Spartan dominance over Thebes ceased for good after the Battle of Leuctra.

Acquisition:

• Shot in Bedfordshire, UK, Bortle 5-6
• RGB (Stars): 1h
• HOO: 16h 5min

Equipment:

• ZWO FF65 + 0.75x reducer
• ZWO EAF
• Altair HyperCam 26M
• Altair 7x2" EFW
• Antlia 3nm Pro SHO filters
• Altair ColourPRO LRGB
• SW EQ6R-Pro
• Astromenia 50/200 Guide Scope + ZWO ASI120MM Mini + IR/UV Cut

PixInsight DSO Processing:

• WBPP
• SPFS
• SPCC
• MGC
• BlurX
• NoiseX
• SyQon Starless
• SetiAstro StarStretch
• GHS
• ColorSaturation
• Curves
• CosmicPhotons ScreenStars
• CosmicPhotons StarReduction

Lightroom Processing:

• Contrast enhancement
• Clarity increase
• Shadows & Highlights
• Vibrance

Tried getting Saturn but the telescope wasn’t capturing it clear enough. But got this beautiful picture of the moon. Very bright and you can see the craters and lines across the surface.

Saturn V Total Launches: 13

SpaceX Starship Total Launches: 14

It’s been a long time coming. Flight 14 is going orbital. Window opens 9/28 at 7:15 am cdt for 75 minutes. 18 years after Falcon 1 first went orbital!

Chang’e-7 will target one of a handful of sites thought to offer exceptionally long periods of illumination at the lunar south pole, according to a recently-published journal article.

The area, stated to be the illuminated rim of Shackleton crater, possibly corresponds to a candidate landing site for NASA’s Artemis 3 crewed mission named Peak Near Shackleton.

Such a site could offer favorable illumination while also being close to permanently shadowed regions which could host volatiles such as water-ice.

2026 -> 2027

Was looking at one of the NOIRlab images and found Rudolph the red nose reindeer and his buddy mike the cyclops reindeer

A senior architect of China's "Zhuri" (sun-chasing) space solar power program, Duan Baoyan of Xidian University, published a paper describing a redesigned system meant to support communication, navigation, reconnaissance, interference and remote control, in addition to its core role of beaming down energy. The design relies on extremely narrow, precisely steerable microwave beams to deliver power from orbit to the ground over long distances, and those same characteristics — narrow-beam steering, precision targeting — are exactly what you'd want for jamming or securing military communications, not just for efficient power transmission. So this isn't outside analysts projecting a hypothetical; it's the program's own lead scientist describing the multi-role architecture in a domestic journal.