Nowadays I think we're all pretty used to seeing amazing images online from space telescopes & ground based observatories.
But behind each picture there are teams of talented professionals working to create these spectacular cosmic visions.
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In February's @SkyatNightMag I've interviewed some of the world's top space image processors & visualisation experts about their work blending art and science.
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The piece - 'Picturing Space' - looks at how professional space mission imagery and visualisations are made, and the challenges the creators face along the way.
Think this shot (captured about 20 minutes ago) is what you might call 'celestially busy'. :-)
- the Moon✅
- Earthshine✅
- (partial) lunar corona✅
- a Red Planet✅
- an Ice Giant✅
- star-flecked sky✅
For fun here are the rough light-travel times:
- lunar corona (~1/250000th of a second)
- Moon (1.33s)
- Earthshine (as above, but it's already done trip once!)
- Mars (9 min)
- Uranus (164 min)
- stars (Mu Ceti [brightest in FOV] = 84yrs. Xi Arietis [2nd brightest] = 870 yrs).
That means that some of the light that landed on my DSLR sensor set off ~450 years before the invention of the telescope; while the light from the clouds could have made ~25,000 trips back & forth in the time it took my brain to send the message to my hand to fire the shutter.
21:33UT and I’ve just sighted Comet #NEOWISE (C/2020 F3) using 10x50 binoculars. Bright & fuzzy head with part of tail already visible – even in the bright twilight over Exmoor.
Comet and bright part of its tail easily visible to the naked eye now.
Wow >>> reddit.com/r/space/commen… I've just checked in PS & the flashes from the 2 different feeds are in *exactly* the same location. Given there was *also* a visual obs I'd bet good money this was indeed a meteoroid impact on the Moon during the #lunareclipse h/t @AwesomeAstroPod
So (assuming the time-stamp on the timeanddate.com feed was accurate) anyone who was videoing the eclipse at 04:41UT might want to check their footage for another data point! The flashes in the feeds occurred close to crater Byrgius (west of Mare Humorum). #lunareclipse
Update on the potential #lunareclipse meteoroid impact: here's *another* video (different observing site to the 2 other feeds) showing a flash @ the same spot west of Mare Humorum: