@citizenskies.com
Astrophotographer & amateur astronomer at 37.8 N. Telescope operator at Lick Observatory lickobservatory.org. Join me on Mastodon: lookup.citizenskies.com. 🔭 William Optics Redcat 51 (250mm f/4.9) 🏔️ ZWO AM5 📸 Canon EOS 6D 🖼️ queerastro.space 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️🇹🇼 he/him
Photo shows a huge section of the 36" telescope dome ripped off and fallen onto the roof of the building next door.
Saddened to hear of the damage to the 36" dome at Lick Observatory. It's unknown how this will impact our public programs in the spring, but I'm just glad no one was hurt and that the historic telescope itself doesn't seem to have been damaged.
news.ucsc.edu/2025/12/hist...
Nebula stretching up and down the screen, that very much resembles the state of California on a map. Lots of reds and oranges and yellows in the image.
Penultimate image from my 2024 dark sky observing trip: the California Nebula. And by golly, it really does look like California! 😆
1h 6' integration time, stacked using Siril and lightly processed with Adobe Photoshop & Lightroom.
#astronomy #astrophotography #astro #siril #photoshop #lightroom
Beautiful spiral galaxy viewed from a diagonal angle. You can see details of the arms and a bright core. There are 2 other galaxies in the image, above and below.
Look up! It's the Andromeda Galaxy coming directly for us! ETA 4.5 billion years 👀
From the 2nd night of my 2024 observing trip to the Sierra Nevada mountains. Only 51' integration time because brr it was cold 🥶
#astronomy #astrophotography #andromeda
A chart showing how many people have viewed my astrophotography photos over time. The most popular is my image of the Andromeda Galaxy.
Well this is kind of wild. I hadn’t checked my stats on @unsplash.com in months. And suddenly I’m in the top 25% of contributors?? Top 10% in the last 30 days! 🤯
#astrophotography #astronomy #unsplash
2 nebulae amongst a sea of background stars. Image is centered on the Eagle Nebula which contains the famous "Pillars of Creation".
More from my 2024 dark sky trip...
Here's the Eagle Nebula (M16) & Omega Nebula (M17). 1h 51′ total integration time. Taken with my Redcat 51 & Canon DLSR on a VERY cold night high in the Sierra Nevadas 🏔️
If you squint - or zoom - you'll see the Pillars of Creation.
#astrophotography #astronomy
The dominant feature in this photo is the Pelican Nebula. It literally looks like a giant winged bird, with the head looking to the right and 2 huge wings below it.
More from my 2024 dark sky trip...
North America Nebula (NGC 7000) & Pelican Nebula (IC 5070). Prior to this, I had never captured the Pelican in its entirety in a single photo. But thanks to the huge FOV on the Redcat 51, I see it really does look like a giant bird!
#astronomy #astrophotography
What do you mean I saw PLATO with my own eyes today?? 🫢🫨 #ESAopenday #exoplanet
Lagoon Nebula on the left and Trifid Nebula on the right. Lagoon appears much larger than the Trifid. Both display vibrant hues of red, blue, steel-grey/white.
Resharing images from my September 2024 dark sky observing trip to the Sierra Nevadas.
First up: the Lagoon (M8) & Trifid (M20) Nebulas. 2h 9' total integration time with my Redcat 51 & Canon DSLR camera mounted on ZWO AM5.
#astrophotography #astronomy
The IIgs was my dream computer. I had the brochure for it and pretty much looked at it everyday for years!
It is sooo good!
Excited to be making the space nerd pilgrimage: catching the midnight showing of Interstellar being re-released in IMAX 🍿🥤🚀🪐
Half the theater look like they weren’t born yet when the movie first came out but nevertheless so excited for this!
And to give you a scale of the signal power .... the signal from your home wi-fi is billions of times stronger (I think ~10 billion IIRC) than the signal Earth receives from Voyager spacecrafts. It's incredibly feeble, so detecting it is a big feat!
Well done to this team!
Why this is neat?
Well, the Voyagers are so far away (human's furthest objects) that we need the biggest telescopes in the world (the Deep Space Network) to normally communicate with them. Those are big 70m dishes, so much larger gain.
A 25m dish, and the work of amateurs is a really nice story!
A plot showing frequency offset on x-axis and power in dB on the y-axis. The data shows a radio signal with a lot of noise as the main component, and a single spike rising to 61 dB. This is the signal of the Voyager 1 spacecraft.
The 25m Dwingeloo radio telescope (owned by ASTRON) has been operating since '50s. Recently, it has been used more by amateurs and pro-am radio astronomers.
Excitingly, they picked up the Voyager 1 signal.
Voyager 1 is ~25 billion km away! (~4 x Pluto distance)
www.camras.nl/en/blog/2024...
🔭📡🧪
My favorite nebula! 😍
Sadly it’s unlikely I’ll be able to ever see it with my own eyes 😭
Incredible! I’m actually in the Southern Hemisphere (Sydney) for the first time in my life but I think I’ll have little chance to do any observing given all the clouds 😭
This is HUGE!
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Let's help this go viral!
A few years ago I made some International Space Station HDEV-style renders from Mars Color Imager (MARCI) data, a camera which images most of the Martian surface daily. This video captures the 2018 global dust storm just as it was rolling into Oppy's field site in Meridiani Planum (at ~21 minutes)
Please follow my list of Indigenous scientists! I accidentally deleted my first starter park -- but recreated it with even more names. Who else needs to be added?
go.bsky.app/9LhnuCY
Hi Blueskyers. I run the organization @protectdemocracy.org which aims to do just that.
Over the past decade we’ve won countless cases to protect voters and truth, helped pass legislation, and unfortunately predicted much of what’s happened.
Follow and repost so we can keep doing that here.
Sarah McBride: "It is an attempt to distract ... Every single time we hear them say the word 'trans,' look what they're doing with their right hand. Look at what they're doing to pick the pocket of American workers, to fleece seniors by privatizing Social Security and Medicare."
Governor Gavin Newsom is one of the few Democrats who has spoken up after the elections, in this continued fight for Democracy. For those who want to volunteer:
act.gavinnewsom.com/signup/volun...
For the first time in my life, I’m on strike! ✊
#solidarity
Last weekend, Earth’s most famous technosignature — known as the Arecibo message — celebrated its 50th birthday.
In a story for SciAm, I had the chance to explore the transmission's significance, both then and now.
I couldn't have done it on my own, so here's a bit of how it came to be...🧵
Done! And I reported and blocked a couple more 🫠
Don’t ever think your vote doesn’t count in a blue state! 👇🏻
