The Island is a great place for #nightsky photography as we have little light pollution over the majority of the land and seacape. #LandscapePhotography
1/ Most massive stellar #BlackHole in our galaxy found! With 33 times the mass of the Sun, this is the most massive black hole formed after the collapse of a star that we've found so far in the #MilkyWay.
ESA's Gaia mission found it via the wobble it induces on a star orbiting it, and data from ground-based telescopes helped confirm its mass and elucidate how it formed.
A two frame composite of the Milky Way and my kitty "Ding" waiting for me to join him in the freezing cold tent. Ding loved to go camping with me. I sure do missing Schrödinger, the Kampin' Kitty 💔. (Photo: Massacre Rim, International Dark Sky Sanctuary, Nevada (5/23/2020).)
I took this pic quite a few years ago at ESO's Paranal Observatory in #Chile. It shows the #MilkyWay arching over the entrance to the Residencia, the site's partially underground lodging and my home in the Atacama Desert for many hundreds of nights!
Right at the centre there's the Coalsack Nebula, known to the Mapuche people of south-central Chile as pozoko (water well) and to the Incas as yutu (a bird similar to a partridge).
🚂 "The #train now boarding at Platform 3 is the 02:30 Paranal Express service to Proxima Centauri." 😉
I took this #photo at ESO's Paranal Observatory in #Chile back when I worked there. This wagon was donated by the FCAB (Ferrocarril de Antofagasta a Bolivia). It's being restored by ESO engineer Roberto Castillo, and it will serve as a museum showcasing various astronomical instruments.
#SciArt is a human activity, but often #nature itself provides the brushes and pigments.
Last year the South African Radio #Astronomy Observatory released a stunning view of the core of the #MilkyWay captured by the MeerKAT radio #telescope
Here's my edited version, where the colours map the so-called spectral index, which tells us what causes the radio emission. Those filaments do look like brush strokes, don't they?
The Milky Way, as shown by one of the meteor cams near the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. From 21:07 local time. If you go to the live feed URL below and scroll the play head back about 2 hours (as I write this post), you can see it "live”. The scrollback buffer is about 5.5 hours.
Old pic I took a few years ago at ESO's Paranal Observatory, when the UT4 #telescope was spying on the supermassive #BlackHole at the centre of our #galaxy
Don't worry, the laser was set to "stun", the black hole is ok 😎
I have been on #mastodon for one year now! that's so awesome I feel like there is such a special community of people who are utilizing the #fediverse ! oh and did you know it's #fedibookfair weekend?
there are so many great authors who are posting their literature :msn:
Given its latitude, from ESO's Paranal Observatory in #Chile you can see the core of the #MilkyWay passing directly overhead. In this pic I took a few years ago you can see its faint glow reflected off the dome of one of our 8 m telescopes.
My neck wasn't happy when framing this shot, though, as my camera doesn't have a flip screen! 😅
Happy #BlackHoleWeek to those who celebrate! Here's a pic I took a few years ago back when I worked at ESO's Paranal Observatory in #Chile. One of our 8.2 m telescopes was pointing at the centre of the #MilkyWay, home to Sagittarius A*, a #BlackHole 4 million times more massive than the #Sun.
Astronomers devoted almost a century to unmask this beast:
New #JWST image of the star-forming region Sagittarius C. It's about 300 light-years from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.
The galactic center is a truly bizarre place. It's filled with turbulent, dense, magnetized gas clouds that are forming stars. There are also clusters of massive young stars that impact their environment with outflowing winds, jets, and high-energy light.
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#MythologyMonday
First time participating on this forum 🤞
The Weaver Girl of Chinese mythology was separated from her beloved Cowherd by her Grandmother - who created the Milky Way to keep the star-crossed lovers apart. Eventually the Grandmother relented enough to allow them to meet once a year - when Magpies formed a bridge to reunite them. @mythologymonday#Magpies#MilkyWay
It's #MilkyWay season again here in the northern hemisphere.
I took this image using my phone last night around 2am looking south from my moderately light-polluted site in east Tucson. 5×90s subs captured in Astroshader were combined in Siril. A final stretch was applied in GIMP.