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I live in a Bortle class 9 area (inner-city/ terrible light pollution) so taking pictures of the night sky is a lot of trial and error, pointing my camera in a general direction and blindly shooting at sub-200 iso and screwing around with varying lengths of exposure.
Last night I sat in my driveway for three hours with a mug of tea and finally captured a very cruddy image of something mildly interesting: That little pinkish half circle in the middle is M42, the Orion Nebula. It’s a cloud of hydrogen gas and dust 8 quadrillion miles from my back yard, which means that the picture you’re looking at is actually from 1,500 years ago. The nebula is 12 times larger than our entire solar system and has around 700 baby suns incubating inside it.
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big glasses that can see into the past
this pic is of a star I saw forming in the Orion Nebula when I looked through a telescope last month (I cried)
Jan 19, 2024
A beautifully simple site from NASA that still looks like it did when it first launched in 1995 and only has one purpose: provide a unique astronomy photo every day of the year and a short explanation written by a professional astronomer.
The bare bones nature of the site is very calming and looking at photos of celestial bodies is a very humbling and grounding thing for me to do when I'm overthinking too much or have spent hours consuming brain rot and need a palate cleanser.
This was the pic for 02/18/2025, a grouping of cosmic clouds titled: Thor's Helmet versus the Seagull
Feb 19, 2025
hubble has been capturing some of the most beautiful images of space since 1990 and yesterday images of messier 44 were released. so beautiful and so interesting to read about. I love reading about the pockets of space it captures. astronomy is one of the coolest things ever.
Mar 9, 2024
Top Recs from @nathanpthousand
I quit smoking cigarettes so I needed something else to stand around outside doing. So far I’m not very good at it but it’s really put into perspective what a waste of money cigarettes are.
3d ago
It’s like a movie trailer that gives away the whole plot but for the Post Office
2d ago
3d ago