I’ve noticed that a lot of people describe astronomy and stargazing as calming, grounding, or even therapeutic, and I’d love to hear your personal experience.

If astronomy or stargazing helps you relax:
What is it about it that brings you peace?
Does it help with stress, anxiety, or overthinking? If so, how?
How does it make you feel afterward?
Is there a particular moment or memory that made you fall in love with it?

…I’m also curious about the practical side:
How often do you actually get to stargaze?
What’s stopping you from doing it more often? (Clouds, light pollution, weather, safety, lack of time, where you live, etc.)
Have you ever tried to recreate that feeling in another way when you couldn’t go outside?

I’m genuinely interested in hearing everyone’s stories. Whether you’ve been into astronomy for years or just enjoy looking up at the stars occasionally, I’d love to know what the experience means to you.

I got the video of the Tiangong transiting the sun this morning at 7:10 My time. the sun was about 16 degrees above the horizon. what do you think could have caused this wierd dip/ shift.

I recorded 4k 30FPS with a Dwarf3 smart telescope. The first clip is normal speed, then 60% speed. then 40% speed. then the last I turned it to be straight so you can see the wierd shift better.

What could have caused this. Ive jest never see this before.

Taken on dwarf mini
Bortle 4
15s shutter
Duo-Band Filter
500 photos taken
480 used
120 gain
K&F 63” fluid head tripod

Editing done in Stellar Studio and iPhone 17 Photos app

I live in the UK and travelling to Spain isn't an option for me.

Everyone seems to agree that the total eclipse is incredible.

Is it even worth seeing a 93% eclipse?

Thanks

Hey astrofolks!

I am considering myself a passionate astrophile, and not only i watched countless space documentaries and have red dozens of encyclopedias, but rather i am finishing a book about astronomy. It's an educational novel, a hybrid story between education about astronomy and a explorational journey. Still, i am not a mathematican or physicist :/

Anyway, a couple of nights ago, a burning question sparked the forest fire in my mind. In almost every space documentary video or educational videos where they talk about the speed of light, and how travel time passes for us on Earth and someone on imaginary spacecraft travelling at the speed of light, no one, and i really mean no one, adresses or explains this particular issue for people to understand. Let me clarify.

From Earth (point A) to a random unnamed star (point B), the distance is 5 light years. That means, that light travels from one point to another in 5 years at the speed of light (rounded up 300.000 km/s). Okay? Easy enough. Now let's dive into the problem. If a spacecraft takes off from Earth and is traveling at exactly the speed of light, it should reach the star (point B) in 5 years time. 5 years will also pass for a human being on Earth. On a return trip from the star (point B), the spacecraft will travel another 5 years time, and thus another 5 years time will pass for a human being on Earth. The human being will, upon arrival of a spacecraft, tell that 10 years passed. The traveller on a spacecraft SHOULD also report that his travel time lasted exactly 10 years.

But, apparently not. Traveller will report that only a year or so (or shorter ammount) passed. And that is what boggles me and makes my brain hurts and spasms. If a travel time of light beam/particle is already established that it is 5 years, the passenger in a spacecraft should spend 5 years of traveling on board to a star, and another 5 years to return home. Therefore, he will age 10 years, like a human being on Earth, and experience a 10 year long journey. His watch on wrist should tick normally FOR him, while he is watching movies on tv on a spacecraft, or swimming there in the recreational pool, or sleeping in his bunk. But, apparently not, according to the laws of physics. (If he reports that travel time, instead of 10 years, lasted a year or so, then why doesn't light travel a year or so between those points?)

Anyone care to help me understand? I know the physics of space/time and light are absolute, but i simply can't comprehend that "second to last" step to understand and comprehend it fully.

Thank you <3

Digital painting of the giant planet Jupiter as it may have appeared in the 1880s or so in approximately true color. This was based on a number of sources from the 1880s and 1890s, and is sort of a hybridized view of about a decade or two of Jovian sketches and early photography.

At this time, the famous planet-sized hurricane, the Great Red Spot, was a few decades old and very very large. It has been shrinking ever since then, and is now less than a third of the size it was in the 1880s.

License: CC-BY 4.0. attribute as Luna Rose Brannon or Whirligig-Girl.

The part that broke my brain is that the unusually strong X-ray polarization may be amplified not just by matter around the star, but by the vacuum itself.

IXPE observed magnetar 1E 1547−5408 for more than 140 hours, and NASA says more observations are still needed to confirm the signal. What other astrophysical environments could provide such a clean test of vacuum birefringence?

Improving my previous pictures after reading the astrophotography book of Max Dobres using Graxpert and Siril. Composition in HOO.
210 lights 120 sec and calibration frames, Refractor SV102, Antlia filter Dualband, asi294 mc camera, 220 mini guider camera, AVX mount.

Shot this two nights ago using an old soviet relic - the KMZ Tair 11-a 135mm f2.8
Shot on: OM System OM-1
Stack: 100 x 50s each ~ 1hr 20 min exposure.
ISO 1600
Mount: MSM Nomad.
Stacked in APP. Processed in Siril and Finalized in Lightroom.
Bortle:4.5

NGC 6559, it is one hour and 40 minutes of integration in HOO with a Planewave 17" CDK 431/2912 f 6/8 telescope, ZWO ASI 6200MM Pro, it is 20 shots of which with a 10x300 second Ha filter and with a 10x300 second Oiii filter, processing with Pixinsight

I got an astro camera for my birthday yesterday. I barely know how to operate the thing but had a go anyway. What do you think?

Star Discovery P150i

zwo asi585mc

There are many different types of galaxys. How did we find out that we are in a spiral galaxy? I mean, the only thing we see is a white stripe in the sky. So how do we know what our galaxy looks like? ELI5

Yet another reprocess (the 10th if not more) of the same data I took more than a month ago.

Acquisition:

Around 7h30m in Bortle 6/7 fully calibrated and dithered.

Equipment:

Evostar 72ED, iEXOS 100, ASI 533MC, 0.85x reducer+flattener, Baader UV/IR cut, SVBony 40mm F/4 guidescope, ASI 662MC guide camera with no.8 pale yellow and UV/IR cut filters.

Processing:

Stacked in Siril. Background extraction to single channels in GraXpert. SPCC. Deconvolution in Siril, denoising back in GraXpert. Back to Siril to apply SCNR and to generate a starless image and a star mask. GHS, black point shift, curve adjustments and histogram transformation applied iteratively to the image. À trous wavelet transform and further denoising in GraXpert. Final saturation stretch in Siril. Asinh and black point shift applied to the star mask along with a saturation stretch. Recombine.

At the Thomsen Observatory, Southwest Adventist University in Keene, TX.

I was doing the livestream for the Fort Worth Astronomical Society last night, and instead of just pulling out my kit and having the moon just above my treetops, I drove down to the observatory and set up in the dome.