Credit: Massimo Penna

The (left) image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 13, 2010. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 70,000 kilometers (43,000 miles) from Mimas. Image scale is 418 meters (1,372 feet) per pixel.

Credit:
Left: NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute
Right: Lucasfilm

On Tuesday morning before sunrise, Jupiter and the crescent Moon will have a spectacular close encounter. In parts of the USA and Canada, it will become a rare occultation.

The Oct. 6th lunar occultation of Jupiter is one of the best astronomy events of 2026. Observers across a wide swath of the USA will have a ringside seat as Jupiter vanishes behind the edge of the Moon, then reappears again later. Jupiter is very bright, so this is a naked-eye event.

If you have a telescope, take a closer look: Europa, Callisto and Io slip behind the Moon minutes before Jupiter does. Ganymede follows. Even small telescopes will show this procession.

Different cities have different occultation times. For instance, in New York, Jupiter disappears at 4:23 a.m. EDT and reappears at 5:27 a.m. In Chicago, it is 3:22 to 4:17 a.m. CDT. West Coast cities will see only a close encounter--no occultation--but the near miss will be beautiful. The best time to look in the west is between 3:00 and 5:00 am PDT.

If you're in the occultation zone, watch the whole thing. The end is especially good. Jupiter is a disk, not a point, so takes nearly a minute to reappear over the Moon's mountainous dark limb. The Galilean satellites will pop into view one after another, abruptly like stars.

Image Credit: Andrew McCarthy
Text Credit: SpaceWeather.com

Credit: Peter Ward

A deep image of the Sombrero galaxy reveals surprises. M104 is named the Sombrero galaxy because, on shorter exposures, it looks like a hat. A key defining feature of this huge galaxy is a dark brim of dust that circles the disk galaxy's center.

A much longer exposure, however, brings up a hairy past where a bright, hazy halo is revealed that extends well past the central disk and contains many unresolved stars. Surprisingly, in this stellar haze, structures can be seen that include a diagonal ring. These structures and tidal streams provide fresh evidence that M104 had a violent past and is surely the result of collisions and mergers of smaller galaxies.

Light takes about 30 million years to reach us from the Sombrero galaxy, which fully spans about 150 thousand light years across. The featured image was taken over seven days in mid-2026 from Namibia.

Credit: Engelbert Vollmer

Hello, friends! I'm well into my third year in the astrophotography hobby and every Fall I keep coming back to the jewel of the Autumn sky, the Seven Sisters (I should make a separate comparison post of all my attempts to date).

This time, I've gathered 4.5h or broadband data and 4.5h or Ha/Oiii data with Askar D1 filter, extracted and combined Ha signal into the stretched/processed RGB image.

The amount of dust detail is pretty high for such a short integration time, and I also hope I haven't overprocessed this too much, which seems to be my vice - love vibrant colours, but I have little sense of when to stop pushing the data. More importantly, the data was gathered under Bortle 4.5 rural/suburban sky with a fast hyperbolic newtonian @ f/2.8 (Sharpstar 13028 NHT 5'')

Stacked and processed in latest Pixinsight, up until the layer combination, then combind starless RGB, RGB stars and continuum subtracted Ha B&W channel in the Affinity Photo 2 layers-based editor.

Thank you for stopping by and taking a look. Clear skies!
PS. Higher res version in my AstoBin here Pleiades, yearly pilgrimage, 2027/10 - AstroBin

This image of Sagittarius B2 was taken by our u/NASAWebb telescope.

Images of Helene taken by the Cassini spacecraft, with resolutions of up to 24 meters per pixel, show a landscape characterized by broad 2–10 km scale depressions with interior slopes no greater than 12°. These basins are likely the decayed remains of old impact craters.

Thin, elongated km-scale raised grooves trace the slopes of many of Helene's basins, likely representing mass flow features and indicating that the moon is undergoing active geologic processes such as mass wasting and erosion. Digital elevation models suggest that the grooves have a positive relief of between 50 and 100 meters. Helene has more than 70 craters, while it shows a bimodal appearance—the heavily cratered trailing hemisphere exhibits a crater density ten times greater than the smooth-looking leading hemisphere.

Credit: NASA / Jet Propulsion Laboratory / Space Science Institute

Link to the website for full story here https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Technology/Shaping_the_Future/GOMX-5_successfully_launched#msdynmkt_trackingcontext=95cb077f-0536-4eba-8b2f-99780c890000

The latest technology demonstration CubeSat from ESA’s General Support Technology Programme (GSTP) and developed with Danish company GOMSpace, launched yesterday evening, 1 October 2026, onboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Transporter-18 mission

GOMX-5 is an In-Orbit Demonstration mission, which aims to demonstrate several new technologies in space.

European Space Agency

Acquisition Details:

Location: Bortle 5

Gear: Sony a7III, Samyang 135mm

Frames: 490 x 20s, ISO1600

Processing: stacked in Astro Pixel Processor, processed in Seti Astro Suite Pro, Photoshop.

The Soviet Union put Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, into Earth's orbit. Sputnik contained a radio transmitter that sent back the “beep-beep-beep” heard around the world.

Image Credit: NSSDC, NASA

Taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner –– doesn’t show how M83 looks in the light our eyes can see. Instead, it depicts the light emitted by cold gas molecules, the ingredients of star formation.

https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw2640a/

She wrote in her post

Room with a view. Check out my new digs as I camp out in Dragon until our departure. With Crew-13’s arrival we have a very full house on the International Space Station. Luke is living in my previous crew quarters, and I’ve pitched a tent in Dragon.

Credit: Astronaut Jessica Meir

Link to the science release on NASA website

Jupiter's moon Io, its night side illuminated by reflected sunlight from Jupiter, or "Jupitershine."

Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS
Image processing by Emma Wälimäki © CC BY

While hiking, I found these cool rocks with Cygnus on top. At 50mm this is a target with so many details, but I've taken it so many times over the years that this time I wanted to do something different and capture the dust nearby. I took 4 panels with 4 hours of integration each. It surprised me how faint the dust in this area is. The Hydrogen Alpha is another story, there's so much and some OIII, specially in the North America Nebula. 

ig: @ igneis.nightscapes

NO generative AI involved.

GEAR:

Sony a7IV astromodified x2, twin setup

Sony 50mm GM f/1.4

ZWO AM3N

The opposition surge (sometimes known as the opposition effect, opposition spike or Seeliger effect) is the brightening of a rough surface, or an object with many particles, when illuminated from directly behind the observer.

Two physical mechanisms have been proposed for this observational phenomenon: shadow hiding and coherent backscatter.

Credit: Backdoor Astronomy
Edit: Milky Way

The gegenschein, a faint glow of sunlight scattered back toward Earth by dust grains in the inner solar system, sits in Aquarius at the point directly opposite the Sun in this all-sky view.

This is a view of the surface of asteroid Ryugu captured by the MASCOT probe during its descent on October 3, 2018 after separation from Japan's Hayabusa-2 spacecraft.

The area in the foreground spans about 29 cm/11.4 inches across.

Credit: MASCOT/DLR/JAXA
Edit by Jason Major

Space Shuttle Atlantis launched on its first mission. The Shuttle and crew traveled 1.7 million miles before returning to Earth.

Credit: Erik Fraser