Top posts of the year thread in order. Guess how many before you get to space 😂

First: Gregory’s adoption👇 Second most popular, the update when he got settled

A traveled to the top of a Volcano in Hawaii to capture this: Saturn briefly covered by the moon. One of the most difficult shots I’ve captured and a bucket list moment, this event gave me a new perspective on the solar system.

I’ll have it available in print for a short time. If you want the print, head to the link in my bio. To keep details on the planet, I cropped it differently based on the size. The largest print shows the entire moon, with the planet just a distant light (but the details are still there 🤓)

In case you needed another reason to hate Instagram, they’re automatically adding “AI generated” tags to space photos.

With the growing flat earth community and general institutional distrust, systems like this need to be responsibly designed.

No, my work is not AI. 🧵 I’ve spent years refining my processes, which are difficult and not analogous to traditional photography, which may be confusing the detectors, which couldn’t have possibly trained enough on these sorts of photos.

Learn more about my process here.

cosmicbackground.io/blogs/learn-ab…

Right now Saturn is at its closest to Earth. It rises as the sun sets, and is in the sky all night long.

Here's a photo of it I captured using two telescopes, and a short thread about how it was captured. The planet & moons can be captured at the same time, but only when seeing conditions are good enough which sadly doesn't happen often here lately. For that reason, I captured the relatively small and dim moons by overexposing the planet where the moons showed up as faint blobs!

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about why I left the USA. I suppose it’s time I come clean. A couple months ago, I decided to photograph the moon deep in infrared light and saw something that caught my eye. 1/ I shared my findings with select high-profile astronomers who advised me to keep my findings a secret until they could understand exactly what they were looking at. A few days passed 2/

I modified one of my telescopes to be able to look at the sun.

This is what it's looking at right now: The sun's incredibly dynamic atmosphere.

DO NOT attempt to do this unless you know what you're doing, you could easily blind yourself. Here's some background on how I learned to do this:

Side note- today's captures are part of an ongoing project I'll be sharing with you soon!cosmicbackground.io/blogs/learn-ab…

In 2019 this photo of the moon changed my life. I went from a nobody to Andrew McCarthy: astrophotographer. Thank you for supporting me back then for liking and and sharing it!

Anyways, here’s a mobile wallpaper of the image because I love you. Feel free to download and save as a device background! Meanwhile, if you want to be sure these show up in your feed make sure to engage in the post somehow so the algorithm knows to show you the next ones!

I’m frequently asked why I’m able to photograph galaxies in detail when they’re so far away, when photographing things that are closer like satellites and planets is so difficult. You’d think capturing a planet shot would be easier than this, right? Each object represents a different challenge: planets are much closer to us, yes.. but in a cosmic sense, they’re quite small. Compare these photos of Mars: you can see in context against the moon just how small it is in the sky.

My last image of the international space station brought a lot of "interesting" conversations to the thread say the least. Everything from the moon is a hologram to I'm paid by NASA to fake these images. Here's a short thread about my take on these ideas. First of all, here's the thread if you missed it. Some great context for how I captured this image as well as some great entertainment in the replies:

https://twitter.com/AJamesMcCarthy/status/1662116863181197313?s=20

One of the most difficult shots I've ever attempted, here is the @Space_Station captured in broad daylight as it transited the waxing crescent moon. Captured using two telescopes in tandem, This is the most detailed transit shot I've ever achieved of the ISS. The full shot makes it feel like the ISS is orbiting the moon, making me yearn for the future when the Lunar Gateway is an occupied fixture in lunar orbit. With that in mind, I titled this piece "New Frontiers", available as a limited edition print here: cosmicbackground.io/pages/new-fron…

My recent video of the International Space Station drew a lot of questions, so before I release the image I captured I thought I would put together a thread describing exactly how you can capture a similar photo! 👇 If you're not interested in how to do it and just want to know when I'm dropping my new image of the station (I personally think it's one of my best but I'll let you decide) you can see it early by either subscribing to me on twitter or on my website: cosmicbackground.io

Yesterday I captured a quite tricky shot: The International Space Station transiting the waxing crescent moon during broad daylight. Here is the moment of the transit, slowed down to roughly 1/7th speed. I captured this transit using two cameras and two telescopes operating simultaneously at around 250fps, and even so the ISS was only in frame for a handful of shots. To learn more about how I do these, I wrote up a brief tutorial on my website: cosmicbackground.io/blogs/learn-ab…

I heard someone recently say the international space station doesn't exist. Rather than argue with them, I thought I'd share a bit of knowledge. Did you know you can easily capture it yourself? There's apps that show you when it crosses the sky, but I find that's the hardest way to capture it. If you wait until it passes in front of the moon, you can easily capture its shape! To do this, I use the website transit-finder.com

On Friday, the sun put on a dazzling show for us. My friend @TheVastReaches and I worked hard over the last 5 days to produce this incredibly detailed 140 megapixel image to illustrate how wonderfully dynamic and beautiful our star can be. Make sure you zoom in! @TheVastReaches A blend of science and art, this photo combined over 90,000 images meticulously layered and processed to reveal our star in a way you've never seen before. Pick it up in print here: cosmicbackground.io/products/fusio…

Friday I captured around 200k images of our sun. I asked my friend @TheVastReaches for help working all the data so we could create an incredibly detailed image of our star, and we're nearly done. Take a look at this close crop of the final 140 MP pic we'll be sharing tomorrow: This will be by far my most detailed sun picture when we're done working on it, and features a solar prominence (that tornado looking thing) that's over 100,000 miles tall. As always, patrons will get an early look at the final full size image. patreon.com/ajamesmccarthy

More validation this comet is breaking apart- these are individual exposures captured about 5 minutes apart. Not only does it appear to have multiple cores, but they all seem to be moving relative to each other. Context:

https://twitter.com/AJamesMcCarthy/status/1620996910298587136?s=20&t=RPjJYWtfW34I0W6mLms2CQ

I frequently get people asking why none of my photos have satellites in them (except the ISS photos I share). Well, that's because they get stacked out. In a single raw frame, like this one, There are plenty of satellites, visible as thin streaks of light as they pass through. Right after dusk the problem is the worst, as the bright satellites in low Earth orbit are still in direct sunlight. Higher altitude satellites (like geosynchronous ones) are in virtually perpetual sunlight. It's particularly an issue along the equatorial plane.

The light from these galaxies colliding was emitted 23 MILLION years ago, and then travelled across intergalactic space only to be caught by my telescope 3 feet before hitting the ground. I get an existential crisis when I think too much about the mechanics of my hobby. This image was actually captured in early 2020. When I captured it back then I didn't know as much about processing the raw data, so as you can see my initial edit is not as detailed. The same data produces much better results if managed properly.

Last night I captured an incredibly difficult shot: ISS transiting the moon, while gently kissing Tycho crater as it flies by at 5 miles per second. That crater is 53 miles wide, so while the station almost looks like it's orbiting the moon it's actually 1000x closer to us. This is the full image. The field of view of capture was quite narrow, so the rest of the moon was assembled as a mosaic. That creates a super detailed image without sacrificing the composition. You can pick this up in print here: cosmicbackground.io/products/a-vis…

Yesterday I spent hours capturing this: an intricately detailed photo of the sun shot using a specially modified telescope. Here it is in the full 164 Megapixels, so you can zoom into every nitty gritty detail. That sunspot group on the top is currently pointed right at Earth! While I did release this image for print, I realize many of you are still shopping for others today. So I released a gift card on my website as the perfect last-minute gift for the space lover in your life. Get it here: cosmicbackground.io/products/cosmi…

Happening right now: This is the Total Lunar Eclipse- visible over all of North America as I type this. I'm shooting pictures of it all night so I'll share them here as soon as I can. This was captured less than an hour ago and processed in a rush. I’ll have prints up sometime tomorrow for my shots so be sure to get on my mailing list if you aren’t already! cosmicbackground.io