Sun Conjunct Jupiter April 11, 2023 The Sun Brings Highlights. It Sheds Light And Illuminates.

Comet Nishimura (c/2023 P1), 9' Sept '23. Photo by Michael Jaeger, AZM (Astronomisches Zentrum Martinsberg) Austria.

Shitty, shitty potato quality iphone pictures, but caught this rocket launch tonight while I was driving home. This was a Firefly Alpha rocket launched out of Vandenberg.

What absolutely kills me is that I had my full camera rig in the car. I had driven out earlier in the evening, aiming to go set up at the Pinnacles to do some astrophotography tonight. Unfortunately, the hurricane floods trashed the trail to Pinnacles and so I had to turn back.

And I am in absolute mourning for what could have been. If I'd been able to get there, I would have had the perfect shot. A clear sky and the early stages of the Milky Way, with this rocket launch arching behind the incredible rock formations at Pinnacles.

It would have been killer. And instead I ended up with these crap phone photos shot out the window of my Jeep while driving back into town. Sigh.

Dueling Bands in the Night : What are these two bands in the sky? The more commonly seen band is the one on the right and is the central band of our Milky Way galaxy. Our Sun orbits in the disk of this spiral galaxy, so that from inside, this disk appears as a band of comparable brightness all the way around the sky. The Milky Way band can also be seen all year – if out away from city lights. The less commonly seem band, on the left, is zodiacal light – sunlight reflected from dust orbiting the Sun in our Solar System. Zodiacal light is brightest near the Sun and so is best seen just before sunrise or just after sunset. On some evenings in the north, particularly during the months of March and April, this ribbon of zodiacal light can appear quite prominent after sunset. It was determined only this century that zodiacal dust was mostly expelled by comets that have passed near Jupiter. Only on certain times of the year will the two bands be seen side by side, in parts of the sky, like this. The featured image, including the Andromeda galaxy and a meteor, was captured in late January over a frozen lake in Kanding, Sichuan, China. via NASA

Galaxy Cluster Cornucopia

Capturing the Milky Way at Joshua Tree [OC] [4819 x 3855] by dahhello

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Strange star system may hold first evidence of an ultra-rare 'dark matter star'

In a distant star system, a sunlike star orbits an invisible object that may be the first example of a 'boson star' made of dark matter, new research suggests.

Astronomers long thought that a peculiar star system observed by the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite was a simple case of a star orbiting a black hole.

But now, two astronomers are challenging that claim, finding that the evidence suggests something far stranger: Possibly, a never-before-seen type of star made of invisible dark matter. Their research, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, was published April 18 on the preprint server arXiv.

The system itself consists of a sunlike star and, well, something else. The star weighs a little less than the sun (0.93 solar mass) and has roughly the same chemical abundance as the sun. Its mysterious companion is much more massive — around 11 solar masses. The objects orbit each other at a distance of 1.4 astronomical units, about the distance at which Mars orbits the sun, making a complete orbit every 188 days.

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Total Solar Eclipse Shadow from a Balloon by 970717

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The moon two days ago

“The Day the Earth Smiled.” The wide-angle camera on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has captured Saturn’s rings and our planet Earth and its moon in the same frame. July 19, 2013. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute [838x958] by trismegisto97

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A House Under the Stars by vglima1975