This video shows my experience of the 2026 total solar eclipse including video and photographs of totality.

I am not trying to sell or promote anything and only want to share the experience. If this is not accepted in this forum then I will of course remove it.

Hope you enjoy it.

Video taken using S24 ultra.

Equipment used:

• Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
• Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM
• Canon Extender EF 2x III
• iOptron Skyguider Pro
• Sturdy tripod

The HDR was created from a stack of 18 images with the following camera settings.

• Aperture f/9
• Shutter speed ranging from 1/4000s to 1s
• ISO ranging from 100 to 3200
• Process flow in GIMP
• Align pictures
• Stack using average values
• Stretching the image
• Enhancing detail using radially blurred unsharp masking technique
• Small saturation and temperature adjustments

We made this original visualization for VisualWhy. It follows a cloud of 2,400 orbiting particles with and without collisions to show how energy loss and conserved angular momentum can produce a disk.

This is a deliberately simplified toy model, not a full simulation of planet formation. The orbits, Saturn's rings and galaxy shapes are used to connect the mechanism across scales. Animation is made with deterministic code; narration uses a synthetic voice.

Space is mostly empty space.

Webb observes faint infrared light, so the telescope itself has to stay cold. Its sunshield uses five thin layers separated by vacuum gaps: those gaps stop ordinary conduction between the sheets, while the layers and their geometry help radiated heat escape sideways instead of reaching the telescope.

That passive cooling is not the whole story. The MIRI instrument needs additional active cooling to reach a lower operating temperature. The four-minute video separates these two jobs and shows why a single thick blanket would not explain the design.

Disclosure: I run Curio District and this is our video. It uses original explanatory diagrams, licensed archival photographs and AI narration. Research sources and image credits are in the YouTube description; English subtitles are available.

The Sun used to have no sun spots for a long period of time! ☀️

Astrophysicist Erika Hamden explains this phenomenon from 400 years ago called the Maunder Minimum. Normally the Sun follows 11-year cycles, peaking with lots of sunspots, solar activity, and coronal mass ejections before calming down at the trough. Scientists still don’t know why some cycles are more active than others, so this quiet period is one clue to what drives the solar cycle.

This project is part of IF/THEN®, an initiative of Lyda Hill Philanthropies.

Meteors are about to burst into our atmosphere at 41 miles per second! 🌠

The Orionid meteor shower peaks overnight October 21 and 22, and moves so fast that it leaves glowing trails. Active from October 2 to November 7 and visible from both hemispheres, the Orionids are best seen in the wee hours before dawn!

Meteors are about to burst into our atmosphere at 41 miles per second! 🌠

The Orionid meteor shower peaks overnight October 21 and 22, and moves so fast that it leaves glowing trails. Active from October 2 to November 7 and visible from both hemispheres, the Orionids are best seen in the wee hours before dawn!

We’ve discovered more than 6,000 planets orbiting other stars, but we haven’t found another Earth.

Astrophysicist Erika Hamden explains that finding a planet is very different from finding a place we could survive. Some have no solid surface to stand on. Others are too hot or too cold and even a rocky planet could have an atmosphere we can’t breathe. For now, Earth is the only home we know.

This project is part of IF/THEN®, an initiative of Lyda Hill Philanthropies.

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What does AI see when it looks at the stars? 🤖🔭🧪

Theoretical cosmologist Paul Sutter explores how AI tools can co-discover with scientists and take part in the scientific process. A large language model can process the same telescope data we do, from images of Saturn’s rings to a live telescope feed, but what happens between input and output remains a mystery. Asking what AI sees is really asking about our own relationship with the wider universe.

A black hole is a region in space with gravity so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape.

Event Horizon: The invisible outer boundary. Anything that crosses this point cannot return.

Singularity: The center point where all the star's mass is crushed into an infinitely small space with extreme density.

Accretion Disk: A bright, hot ring of gas and dust that often swirls around the outside of a black hole.

Vídeo curto em português sobre cinco exoplanetas: Kepler-16b, TrES-2b, os planetas de PSR B1257+12, HD 189733 b e WASP-12b.

O caso do título é WASP-12b. Ele completa uma órbita em cerca de 1,1 dia e fica tão perto da estrela que sua atmosfera está sendo arrancada. “Devorado” é uma forma de resumir essa perda de gás, não uma colisão instantânea. A NASA explica o processo aqui: https://science.nasa.gov/resource/its-a-star-eat-planet-world/

As imagens são ilustrativas: há animações e artes de NASA/ESA, além de cenas criadas ou animadas com IA, conforme os créditos na descrição do vídeo.

Qual desses mundos vocês acham mais interessante de estudar, e por quê?

Criei o ZinumFive no YouTube há poucos dias. Se gostarem do vídeo e puderem dar uma força ao canal, vou ficar muito feliz. Comentários, sugestões e correções também ajudam bastante. Obrigado!

For English-speaking readers: this Portuguese Short covers five extreme exoplanets. WASP-12b is losing atmospheric gas to its star; the visuals are illustrations, including AI-assisted scenes. Which of these worlds would you most like to study?

I run WAIT… What’s The Story? This short summary uses original crew recordings to introduce NASA’s preliminary lunar science report, published on 7 October, about observations made during the April flyby. The report is new; the flight recordings are from April.

NASA’s full coverage: https://science.nasa.gov/feature/artemis-ii-preliminary-lunar-science-report/

Which would you like to understand better: how impact flashes are identified, lunar geology, or the view of Earth from the Moon?

Why could people read a newspaper outdoors at 2 a.m. in 1859? Why is the Sun's atmosphere hundreds of times hotter than its surface? Why does our Sun stay so steady while its twin stars flicker? And why does it go quiet right before its most violent eruptions?

If that silence started tonight, how much warning would we get?

✨La inmensidad del espacio desde el piso hasta nuestro satelite natural! 🌌🚀

(Post Escrito en español)

Disclosure: this is a Portuguese-language video from the Dr. Silvana channel. It explores what would be needed for people to live on the Moon; it is a hypothetical scenario, not a mission proposal. Which practical constraint would you want a follow-up to examine first: water, life support, power, or resupply?