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roystarks.bsky.social
Roy Starks
@roystarks.bsky.social
86 followers 180 following 71 posts
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Reposted by Roy Starks
jwstfeed.bsky.social
Galaxy cluster MACS0416.
Home to "Mothra", an extremely distant star that is magnified by a factor of at least 4,000 times due to gravitational lensing.
🔭 🧪
A field of galaxies on the black background of space. In the middle, stretching from left to right, is a collection of dozens of yellowish spiral and elliptical galaxies that form a foreground galaxy cluster. Among them are distorted linear features created when the light of a background galaxy is bent and magnified through gravitational lensing. At centre left, a particularly prominent example stretches vertically about three times the length of a nearby galaxy. It is outlined by a white box, and a lightly shaded wedge leads to an enlarged view at the bottom right. The linear feature is reddish and curves gently. It is studded with about a half dozen bright clumps. One such spot near the middle of the feature is labelled “Mothra"
January 7, 2025 at 5:57 PM
Reposted by Roy Starks
scipexplorist.bsky.social
The winner of the 2022 Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest was this picture of Comet Leonard, called Disconnection Event. (Image credit Gherard Rhemann)
January 1, 2025 at 1:54 PM
Reposted by Roy Starks
astrojaz.bsky.social
my favorite jwst images from 2024 🌌
A nebula made up of cloudy gas and dust in the form of soft and wispy clouds and, in the center, thin and highly detailed layers pressed close together. Large, bright stars surrounded by six long points of light are dotted over the image, as well as some small, point-like stars embedded in the clouds. The clouds are lit up in blue close to the stars; orange colors show clouds that glow in infrared light. Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Scholz, K. Muzic, A. Langeveld, R. Jayawardhana A star cluster is shown inside a large nebula of many-coloured gas and dust. The material forms dark ridges and peaks of gas and dust surrounding the cluster, lit on the inner side, while layers of diffuse, translucent clouds blanket over them. Around and within the gas, a huge number of distant galaxies can be seen, some quite large, as well as a few stars nearer to us which are very large and bright. Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, P. Zeidler, E. Sabbi, A. Nota, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb) A rectangular image with black vertical rectangles at the bottle left and top right to indicate missing data. A young star-forming region is filled with wispy orange, red, and blue layers of gas and dust. The upper left corner of the image is filled with mostly orange dust, and within that orange dust, there are several small red plumes of gas that extend from the top left to the bottom right, at the same angle. The center of the image is filled with mostly blue gas. At the center, there is one particularly bright star, that has an hourglass shadow above and below it. To the right of that is what looks a vertical eye-shaped crevice with a bright star at the center. The gas to the right of the crevice is a darker orange. Small points of light are sprinkled across the field, brightest sources in the field have extensive eight-pointed diffraction spikes that are characteristic of the Webb Telescope. Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, K. Pontoppidan (NASA JPL) and J. Green (STScI) A spiral galaxy with a wide, oval-shaped disc. It has a shining spot at the centre from which two curving, pale red spiral arms emerge, wrapping once each around the galaxy. They’re surrounded by a whirl of bright threads and patches of dust, with spots of star formation scattered throughout. The glow of the disc fades smoothly into the background where some patches of dust can be seen, as well as foreground stars. Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Leroy
December 31, 2024 at 9:00 PM
roystarks.bsky.social
December 31, 2024 at 9:53 PM
Reposted by Roy Starks
pauleric70.bsky.social
The heart of our galaxy, shrouded in dense clouds of dust, reveals its tightly packed starfields only through the penetrating view of infrared light.

Credit: NASA, ESA, Greg T. Bacon (STScI)
December 27, 2024 at 11:35 PM
Reposted by Roy Starks
jasonclay.bsky.social
Merry Christmas! This is my interpretation of the Christmas Tree Nebula, located near the constellation Orion. Five hours of integration time.

Gear: Skywatcher Esprit 100, ZWO AM5, ASI2600MM, ASIAir Plus, EAF, EFW
Processing: Siril, Lightroom, PhotoShop #astrophotography #christmas #astro
December 25, 2024 at 4:30 PM
Reposted by Roy Starks
scipexplorist.bsky.social
Amazing!

VISTA’s infrared view of the Cat’s Paw Nebula...

(Credit: ESO, J. Emerson, VISTA - Acknowledgment- Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit)
December 23, 2024 at 2:35 PM
roystarks.bsky.social
December 21, 2024 at 6:24 PM
Reposted by Roy Starks
adamcsharp.bsky.social
A list of sorely missed Victorian-era slang…

Got the morbs = temporary sadness
Gigglemug = always smiling
Scandal water = tea
Bitch the pot = pour the tea
Sauce-box = mouth
Cupid’s kettle drums = breasts
Dash my wig = OMG
Tight as a boiled owl = drunk
Poked up = embarrassed
Not up to dick = unwell
December 20, 2024 at 11:03 AM
Reposted by Roy Starks
adamcsharp.bsky.social
Some more slang used in Victorian times…

Killing the canary = avoiding work
Afternoonified = smart
Mutton shunter = police
That dab’s in quod = that ruffian’s in prison
Chuckaboo = a close friend
Muff = a silly man
Gropusses = pockets
Daddles = hands
Bacon-faced blunderbuss = full-faced ignoramus
December 20, 2024 at 11:36 AM
Reposted by Roy Starks
redditspaceviewes.bsky.social
Detailed view of Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars

Cr: NASA
December 20, 2024 at 6:49 PM
roystarks.bsky.social
December 20, 2024 at 4:57 PM
Reposted by Roy Starks
allearthpic.bsky.social
Super rare magenta aurora in the sky over Finland ✨
December 19, 2024 at 12:36 PM
Reposted by Roy Starks
redditspaceviewes.bsky.social
Saturn briefly covered by the moon. One of the most difficult shots
December 17, 2024 at 1:47 AM
Reposted by Roy Starks
pauleric70.bsky.social
Trillion star galaxy... 💫💫💫

The Great Andromeda Galaxy 🌌
December 16, 2024 at 9:08 PM
Reposted by Roy Starks
astrojaz.bsky.social
for anyone who needed to see the sun smiling today
Satellite imagery from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the Sun in ultraviolet light colorized in light brown. Dark patches on the Sun's surface are in the shape of a smile.
December 17, 2024 at 12:39 AM
Reposted by Roy Starks
solarham.bsky.social
A large eruption of plasma was observed off the east limb beginning at 03:55 UTC (Dec 17). A narrow, easterly directed CME is currently visible in updated coronagraph imagery. SolarHam.com
December 17, 2024 at 8:45 AM
Reposted by Roy Starks
artinsociety.bsky.social
Yikes! This massive cloud of hydrogen gas and carbon dust is called ‘Lynd’s Dark Nebula 43’. For obvious reasons, it’s also known as the Cosmic Bat Nebula, and I for one am very glad that it’s at least 500 light years away (photo; Jarrod Koh / www.theguardian.com/science/gall...
Ominous brown shape of far-distant dust and gas uncannily resembles a massive bat flying straight at us
December 16, 2024 at 6:35 AM
Reposted by Roy Starks
astrojaz.bsky.social
just remember this isn’t earth… it’s a COMET!!
theplanetaryguy.bsky.social Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.bsky.social · Dec 15
Treat yourself by watching this loop for a while.

A close-up of the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, seen by the Rosetta spacecraft's OSIRIS camera in 2016 and processed by @landru79.bsky.social.

The "snow" is actually dust particles... in front of a moving ocean of stars.
December 15, 2024 at 11:13 PM
Reposted by Roy Starks
scipexplorist.bsky.social
Orion Rising Over Mount Śnieżka
December 16, 2024 at 9:56 AM
Reposted by Roy Starks
astronomers.bsky.social
The Hourglass Nebula |HUBBLE |
This is an image of MyCn18, a young planetary nebula located about 8,000 light-years away, taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This Hubble image reveals the true shape of MyCn18 to be an hourglass with an intricate pattern of 'etchings' in its walls. This picture has been composed from three separate images taken in the light of ionized nitrogen (represented by red), hydrogen (green), and doubly-ionized oxygen (blue). The results are of great interest because they shed new light on the poorly understood ejection of stellar matter which accompanies the slow death of Sun-like stars. In previous ground-based images, MyCn18 appears to be a pair of large outer rings with a smaller central one, but the fine details cannot be seen. Credit: Raghvendra Sahai and John Trauger (JPL), the WFPC2 science team, and NASA/ESA
December 15, 2024 at 1:01 PM
Reposted by Roy Starks
galaxylover.bsky.social
IC1396 Elephant trunk nebula in Cepheus constellation by 📷 nebula images of
December 13, 2024 at 3:17 PM
Reposted by Roy Starks
creatorbluesky.bsky.social
Devil's Tower Nebula
December 13, 2024 at 8:28 AM
Reposted by Roy Starks
scipexplorist.bsky.social
M51 - the Whirlpool Galaxy

(Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI), and the Hubble Heritage Team - STScI/AURA)
December 13, 2024 at 5:07 AM
Reposted by Roy Starks
astronomers.bsky.social
Messier 63, the Sunflower Galaxy |NASA|
The arrangement of the spiral arms in the galaxy Messier 63, seen here in a new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, recall the pattern at the centre of a sunflower. So the nickname for this cosmic object — the Sunflower Galaxy — is no coincidence. Discovered by Pierre Mechain in 1779, the galaxy later made it as the 63rd entry into fellow French astronomer Charles Messier’s famous catalogue, published in 1781. The two astronomers spotted the Sunflower Galaxy’s glow in the small, northern constellation Canes Venatici (the Hunting Dogs). We now know this galaxy is about 27 million light-years away and belongs to the M51 Group — a group of galaxies, named after its brightest member, Messier 51, another spiral-shaped galaxy dubbed the Whirlpool Galaxy. Galactic arms, sunflowers and whirlpools are only a few examples of nature’s apparent preference for spirals. For galaxies like Messier 63 the winding arms shine bright because of the presence of recently formed, blue–white giant stars, readily seen in this Hubble image. ESA/Hubble & NASA
December 13, 2024 at 12:00 PM