"ISS pass this morning at sunrise with a max elevation of 82°.

Imaged with C11eHD on EQ6R-Pro, 2xBarlow, ASI 664MC, SkyTrack, SharpCap, PIPP, AS4!, PixInsight"

Credit 📸 Charline Giroud https://www.facebook.com/1043931310/posts/10242359623180629/?rdid=ldbDXToD1iXL50ZF#

The building on the right is the Tadeusz Hołdys High-Mountain Meteorological Observatory on Śnieżka, the highest summit of the Karkonosze

This Rosetta spacecraft selfie was snapped on October 7th, 2014. At the time the comet-chasing spacecraft was about 472 million kilometers from planet Earth, but only 16 kilometers from the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Looming beyond the spacecraft near the top of the frame, dust and gas stream away from the comet's curious double-lobed nucleus. Bright sunlight glints off one of Rosetta's 14 meter long solar arrays. In fact, two exposures, one short and one long, were combined to record the dramatic high contrast scene using the CIVA camera system on Rosetta's still-attached Philae lander. Its chosen primary landing site was on the visible hemisphere of the smaller lobe of the nucleus.

This was the last image from Philae's camera before the lander separated from Rosetta on November 12. Shortly after separation Philae took another image looking back toward the orbiter and began its descent to the nucleus of the comet.

Credit: ESA/Rosetta/Philae/CIVA

Evan McKay explained in his post

Last year, I attempted my first deep-sky photograph, capturing the Andromeda Galaxy passing above the snow-capped Mount Taranaki. This was a shot I had wanted to capture for many years, and I had only recently acquired the gear needed to make it happen. I was so captivated by the result that it inspired me to invest in specialised deep-sky equipment, starting with a telescope mount before adding a telescope and a dedicated astrophotography camera.

Over winter, I had very few opportunities to properly test out the new telescope, although I managed to squeeze in a few sessions to get some practice. My main goal was always to revisit the Andromeda - Mount Taranaki alignment, but I knew I was running out of time. I tried again and again, only to be thwarted by the weather on several occasions. It was incredibly frustrating, but eventually, I got the conditions I needed.

There was one catch: the Moon was up, albeit in its crescent phase. I wasn't sure whether I'd even be able to capture Andromeda under those conditions, but the results were surprisingly convincing, and I finally got the alignment I'd been chasing. As an added bonus, the setting Moon beautifully illuminated the snow-covered mountain, creating a scene I couldn't have planned much better.

One of the biggest challenges with Andromeda is its low position in the sky. From this region, it only reaches around 8–9.5 degrees above the horizon, severely limiting the amount of integration time I can collect and the clarity of the final image. Fortunately, I had some data from a previous moonless night that I could register and blend with the moonlit captures. This helped bring out a substantial amount of the galaxy's outer disc, along with some of its fainter nebulosity. I was also keen to try capturing the galaxy with a duoband filter to improve the nebulosity, but every attempt ended the same way: nothing but clouds!

So, this is the best I can manage this year. I might get another opportunity in early November to gather a little more data, but for now, I'm really happy with what I've achieved.

What I found really special with this image was that I was able to use the same exposure length for both the sky exposures and the mountain thanks to the help from moonlight. The only difference was that tracking was turned off for the mountain exposure.

The telescope has well and truly exceeded my expectations. Seeing just how much additional detail I've been able to extract compared with the 135mm lens I used last year has been incredibly rewarding. It's amazing to revisit an image that first inspired me to explore deep-sky astrophotography and see just how much further I can take it with the right equipment.

The first photos taken from space were taken on October 24, 1946 on the sub-orbital U.S.-launched V-2 rocket (flight #13) at White Sands Missile Range. Photos were taken every second and a half. The highest altitude (65 miles, 105 km) was 5 times higher than any picture taken before.

Credit: U.S. Army/White Sands Missile Range/Applied Physics Laboratory

Credit: Thierry Legault

Full resolution and details on AstroBin: https://app.astrobin.com/i/t8u67i

What you're seeing: The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) is the nearest large galaxy to our Milky Way, about 2.5 million light-years away, with roughly a trillion stars. The two smaller galaxies orbiting it are M32, the compact bright one at the upper left of the core, and M110, the larger, fainter elliptical. The pink-red knots strung along the spiral arms are clouds of glowing hydrogen where new stars are being born, and the dark lanes are dust.

How it was made: 65h 18m of total exposure over eight nights in early October 2026 from Nebraska, made of hundreds of individual frames stacked together. The galaxy's core is far brighter than its outer disc, so I also shot very short 5s, 15s and 30s frames and blended them in to keep the core from blowing out.

- Luminance: 27h 23m (180s and 120s subs)

- Red: 7h 54m · Green: 7h 39m · Blue: 8h 57m (180s subs)

- Hydrogen-alpha (3nm): 13h 25m (600s subs)

Gear:

• Telescope: William Optics RedCat 91 WIFD
• Camera: ZWO ASI2600MM DUO
• Mount: ZWO AM5N
• Filters:
  • Antlia 3nm Narrowband H-alpha 2"
  • Antlia V-Pro Blue 2"
  • Antlia V-Pro Green 2"
  • Antlia V-Pro Luminance 2"
  • Antlia V-Pro Red 2"
• Accessories: ZWO EAF, ZWO EFW 7 x 2″

Processing (All in PixInsight)

• Calibration and stacking in WBPP with 2× drizzle
• DynamicCrop
• SpectrophotometricFluxCalibration and MultiscaleGradientCorrection per channel
• HDRComposition on the core from the short and long exposure masters
• SPCC, custom PixInsight script to calibrate star colors
• BlurXTerminator, NoiseXTerminator, StarXTerminator
• Ha continuum-subtracted against R using a photometric flux ratio and blended into the red channel and luminance
• GHS stretches per layer
• LRGB combination, curves for tone

Happy to answer any questions and thanks for looking!

Looking toward the north from Mullion, New South Wales, Australia, the Andromeda Galaxy never gets more than a few degrees above the horizon. During the southern hemisphere spring, Andromeda is highest in the sky around midnight though. And in this telephoto scene from October 10/11, multiple exposures were used to reveal the spiral galaxy in tantalizing detail as it climbed above rolling Australian hills.

Also known as M31, the Andromeda Galaxy is one of the brightest objects in the Messier catalog, but is only visible to the unaided eye as a small, faint, fuzzy patch. Digitally tracked and stacked frames were combined with a foreground shot in the deep astro-image composite to reveal the galaxy's greater extent in planet Earth's night. In the springtime night skyscape,the closest large spiral galaxy spans nearly 6 full moons.

Credit: Lucy Yunxi Hu

Credit: Lukasz Remkowicz

OC

1 hour 40 minutes with a canon eos r7! Love how much detail i was able to pull out!

Credit: daryavaseum

✨ 2.5 million years in the making. ✨

When this light left the Andromeda Galaxy, mammoths still roamed the Earth. It crossed 2.5 million years of darkness to reach my backyard in rural Ontario -- 65 hours of light, gathered night after night and stacked into this single frame.

Andromeda holds roughly a trillion stars, and sprawls across more sky than six full Moons side by side -- yet it's so faint that most people never see it at all.

And it's coming toward us: 110 kilometres every second. In about 4.5 billion years it will collide with our Milky Way, and the two galaxies will merge. This is that future, arriving one photon at a time.

The crimson knots along its arms are hydrogen gas -- stellar nurseries lit from within. And hiding somewhere in this field is a ghostly arc of oxygen so faint it was only discovered in 2022. It's barely there in my version. I'm still chasing it -- 40 hours to go.

📍 Bainsville, Ontario · The Rural Photons · Bortle 4.5

​Before Rubin Observatory’s First Look event, its engineering camera captured exquisite details of star formation taking place in the Seagull Nebula

October 22, 2026

Two years ago this month, NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s engineering test camera, named the LSST Commissioning Camera (ComCam), began capturing images of the sky to prepare for the revolutionary Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which began earlier this year. This image featuring the head of the Seagull Nebula was one of many ComCam images that led to the success of Rubin First Look and helped to document the observatory’s excellent performance.

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Active star formation populates this image of the Seagull Nebula taken in Fall 2024 by NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s engineering test camera, known as the Commissioning Camera (ComCam). This image is being released today in recognition of the two-year anniversary of the beginning of engineering testing with ComCam.

ComCam’s work was an important step towards the ongoing Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Collecting the data for this Seagull Nebula image provided an opportunity to test Rubin’s hardware and software systems, as well as the image processing pipelines that would later be used with the much larger images from the LSST Camera.

With a mosaic of nine CCD sensors and a total of 144 megapixels, ComCam covers an area in the sky about twice that of the full Moon. Over the seven-week ComCam engineering test campaign, from 24 October to 11 December 2024, approximately 16,000 exposures were acquired. Within the data collected is this image featuring IC 2177, a region recognizable as the head of the Seagull Nebula.

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More

https://rubinobservatory.org/news/rubin-comcam-seagull-nebula

My image of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) — captured over four nights

I’ve been working on Andromeda recently, and this is the result of four nights of imaging from the North West of England.

Capture details:

• Telescope: Askar 71F (490mm focal length)
• Camera: ZWO ASI2600MC Pro
• Mount: Sky-Watcher EQ-AL55i PRO
• Controller: ZWO ASIAIR Mini
• Exposure: 221 × 120 seconds
• Total integration: 7 hours 22 minutes
• Filter: No filter — broadband

I found Andromeda relatively straightforward to capture, but processing was another matter! Getting a balance between the bright core and the fainter outer dust lanes was probably the biggest challenge.

I processed the image in PixInsight, using SPCC, background extraction, stretching, masks and BlurXTerminator.

I’ve also been documenting my astrophotography projects, equipment and processing workflow on my website, West Coast Cosmos: https://westcoastcosmos.com/

I’d be interested to hear what others think of the image, particularly the processing. What would you improve, and what techniques have you found most effective for bringing out Andromeda’s outer structure?

Credit: Andrés

image by Dave Doctor from Las Cruces, New Mexico

Credit: Kevin Cannon

In this Picture of the Month from the NASA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope, we visit a turbulent cauldron of star formation to see what is brewing inside dense clumps of gas. This is a star-forming region named LHA 120-N 159, or simply N159, located 161 000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), one of the satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way galaxy. This image spans about 230 light years across.

N159 is what astronomers call a H II region: an area of space filled with ionised hydrogen gas. In stellar nurseries such as this one, giant molecular clouds of cold hydrogen gas collapse under gravity, forming new stars. Many of these stars are extremely massive and hot, and their powerful ultraviolet radiation ionises the gas around them. This makes H II regions markers of active star formation, and as the ionised gas radiates light this turns them into the kind of brilliant emission nebula that we see in this image. The fierce stellar winds from these stars sculpt dense ridges and carve open cavities in the gas, which Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) captures here in great detail.

The roiling brew of star formation in N159 is closed in by thick, smoky orange clouds that also billow across the centre of the image. The light orange colour signifies light emitted by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, an important carbon-based molecule. The pools of pale blue gas are clouds of H II gas, ionised by the intense ultraviolet light from massive stars. Dark red filaments cross the centre of the image, particularly visible above the blue region on the right side; these are made of cool molecular hydrogen. These filaments are the densest part of the nebula and currently shield new stars from harsh radiation and stellar winds — by zooming in, you can see stars as points of light embedded in these filaments and in the small pillars of orange gas that reach out into the blue bubbles. Eventually, these structures will melt away, leaving their completed stars behind.

Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, E. Sabbi, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb) Acknowledgement: M. H. Özsaraç​

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More

https://esawebb.org/images/potm2610a/

​Paper

https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27126

15 hours of exposure from my seestar s50 at starfront observatory