r/spaceporn

Credit: Andrew McCarthy

Image:

On July 2, 2026, the Tianwen-2 probe took an image of asteroid 2016HO3 at a distance of approximately 20 kilometers. (Image provided by China National Space Administration)​

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​​The Tianwen-2 probe has arrived at its target asteroid and begun scientific exploration.

BEIJING, July 6 (Xinhua) -- The Tianwen-2 probe, after a journey of about 400 days and 1 billion kilometers, has successfully made contact with asteroid 2016HO3 and has reached a distance of 20 kilometers from the asteroid, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced on July 6.

  Experts from the mission team explained that the probe acquired image data of the asteroid during its approach. Simultaneously, the mission team used the optical navigation data obtained during the approach to improve the asteroid's ephemeris, reducing the positional error previously determined solely by ground-based observations from hundreds of kilometers to the order of kilometers.​

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The probe was successfully launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center on May 29, 2025. During its journey to the asteroid, it performed deep-space maneuvers and mid-course corrections.

  On June 6, 2026, the probe captured the asteroid for the first time; on June 7, it implemented capture control at a distance of 30,000 kilometers from the asteroid, achieving a co-planetary flight with the asteroid; on June 19, it reached a distance of 2,000 kilometers from the asteroid.

  Going forward, the probe will gradually conduct more detailed scientific explorations to obtain information on the asteroid's shape, material composition, and internal structure, providing support for preparations for sampling.​

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Source (in Chinese)

https://www.xinhuanet.com/20260706/eb8cbec6dfc94a0c84a24e6940334f1d/c.html

Andrew Jones

​https:// ​x. ​com/AJ_FI/status/2073922930384253434​

Although gullies are most common in the middle latitudes of Mars, they are also found in equatorial regions. This image shows a 3-kilometer-wide impact crater with gullies all along the steep inner slopes.

An enhanced-color cutout better distinguishes the gully deposits from the surrounding boulder fields. These slopes are very steep, so a fluid like water is not required to explain gully formation.

ID: ESP_035945_1755

date: 28 March 2014

altitude: 262 km

https://uahirise.org/hipod/ESP_035945_1755

NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

NASA's astronaut Chris Williams was practicing some nighttime photographs from one of the windows on the International Space Station at the end of the work day on New Year's Eve.

He had just finished passing over his targets when he noticed something funny – the city below him was twinkling! He quickly took a video and realized that as they were orbiting further east, we had orbited into 2026, and he was actually seeing the New Year's fireworks over Baku, Azerbaijan!

Credit: NASA's astronaut Chris Williams

Experimenting with a method I'm developing myself (although I suspect others have done something similar) combining both OSC from one setup and mono from another setup. It's a bit complicated to explain, but I can try if some want to know.

Data:

Both were taken on a Iexos 100 mount

All subs were 30 seconds, calibrated

 

Mono: Askar 300FRA Pro, MiniCam8 Mono

H - 81 subs

S - 151 subs

O - 152 subs

 

OSC:  AT60ED, Playerone Saturn, Antlia Triband

1304 subs

Stars were from the OSC subs only.

 

All from Bortle 8/9

 

Edited with Siril, GraXpert, SAS Pro, Affinity, and Rawtherapee.

This false-color mosaic shows the entire hemisphere of Iapetus (1,468 kilometers, or 912 miles across) visible from Cassini on the outbound leg of its encounter with the two-toned moon in Sept. 2007.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured this view of Thebe, the second largest of Jupiter’s inner moons, during a close pass on May 1, 2026. The spacecraft’s Stellar Reference Unit (SRU) captured this image from a distance of approximately 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) at a resolution of about 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) per pixel.

Thebe resides at the outer edge of Jupiter’s faint ring system and is believed to play a role in the formation of the planet’s “gossamer” ring through the shedding of dust.

While the SRU’s primary function is to image star fields for navigation, its high sensitivity in low-light conditions makes it a powerful secondary science instrument. The SRU has previously been used to discover “shallow lightning” in Jupiter’s atmosphere and to image the planet’s ring system.

A division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, JPL manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott J. Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.​

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

https://science.nasa.gov/photojournal/nasas-juno-misson-captures-jupiter-moon-thebe/

Credit: Tom Williams

Just finished the new 3D galaxy mode in Milky Way app where you can explore 3 million stars in our galaxy.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this simulation 🙏

NASA's Juno spacecraft entered Jupiter's orbit on July 4, 2016 and has delivered incredible data and stunning imagery ever since.

There is a small transequatorial negative polarity coronal hole rotating towards the central meridian (CM). It will cross it in about two days. Expecting the onset of its effects - first the SIR (Stream Interaction Region), followed by the high speed solar wind stream - on Tuesday and Wednesday. We could see G1 (minor) storm conditions.

Jure Atanackov https://x.com/JAtanackov/status/2073698487569416448?t=vghvGM8aWz5wU1-pBET\_og&s=09

Photo https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/

An X1.3 flare was observed at 20:41 UTC on 04 Jul 2026 from newly numbered Sunspot Region 4482 (left side of the video).

Credit: NOAA/GOES-19/SWPC

Description of each image

https://chandra.si.edu/photo/2026/250th/more.html

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,In celebration of the 250th birthday of the United States, NASA has unveiled four cosmic images from its Chandra X-ray Observatory rendered in red, white, and blue that represent the wonders of the universe the agency explores. The images are accompanied by a trio of new sonifications — a technique that translates astronomical data into sounds.

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The image set begins with Cassiopeia A in the top panel, where X-rays from Chandra (represented in blue and purple) have been combined with an infrared image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (red and white). Chandra’s X-ray vision reveals the blast wave that tore through the star, as well as elements in the debris field like iron, calcium, and oxygen. Webb’s infrared data also shows the expanding shell of material from the explosion and cosmic dust throughout the remnant.

In the bottom row, the first image on the left is the nebula NGC 3603, which contains a massive cluster of stars and is located in the Milky Way galaxy. This new composite image contains Chandra’s X-ray data (red and white) and shows diffuse emission near the galaxy’s center along with point-like X-ray sources throughout the middle of the image. Optical, infrared, and ultraviolet light from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (red-orange, green, blue, and yellow) reveal stars in the center of the image and dust and gas toward the bottom. The combined layering of the colors makes this nebula and the stars forming within it appear primarily red, white, and blue, with X-rays showing the sparkling lights of young stars.

The middle panel of the bottom row is a new look at the galaxy NGC 4736, also known as Messier 94. In this image, X-rays of different wavelengths from Chandra (red, orange, and blue) are layered with a visible light image from astrophotographers using their telescopes on the ground (red, green, and blue). Messier 94 is a spiral galaxy with a bright inner ring around it, called a starburst ring, where new stars are forming, perhaps fueled by gas driven in the unique oval-shaped structure seen here.

The final image in this red, white, and blue quartet features ZwCl 0024+1652. This is a distant galaxy cluster in which astronomers have found evidence for dark matter by using specially processed data from Hubble (blue). Another image from Hubble reveals the individual galaxies in the cluster (appearing as yellow and white). X-ray data from Chandra shows the enormous reservoir of superheated gas that pervades this galaxy cluster (red) with much more mass than all the galaxies taken together.

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https://chandra.si.edu/photo/2026/250th/

The discovery may lead astronomers to revise when these stellar bars began to emerge in the history of the universe.

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​Image:

Composite false-color image of M1149-BSG-z5, created with JWST imaging data taken in F090W+F115W+F150W (blue), F200W+F277W+F300M (green), and F356W+F410M+F444W (red). Credit: Wang et al., 2026.​

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An international team of astronomers reports the discovery of a new massive barred spiral galaxy. The newfound galaxy, designated M1149-BSG-z5, was identified using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The finding was detailed in a paper published June 23 on the preprint server arXiv.

The bars are out there

For astronomers, bars are important structures in galaxies, highly related to galaxy secular evolution. Although bars are common in nearby disk galaxies, at high redshifts, the cosmic environment is drastically different from the local universe, and bar structure formation is expected to be suppressed.

One of the tools that has helped uncover many of these high-redshift barred galaxies is JWST. Observations with this space telescope have found that barred galaxies emerge as early as a redshift of about 4.0, with observed fractions of 3–7% at a redshift of 3.5.

New barred galaxy at the Epoch of Reionization Now, a group of astronomers led by Xiaohan Wang of Tsinghua University in Beijing adds a new galaxy to this list.

"M1149-BSG-z5 was identified in the NIRISS (Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph) imaging parallel field of JWST Cycle-2 program 'Medium-band Astrophysics with the Grism of NIRCam in Frontier Fields,'" the researchers wrote in the paper.

The newfound galaxy M1149-BSG-z5 has a redshift of 5.1 and hosts a stellar bar with a length of approximately 14,700 light-years. This makes it the highest-redshift barred galaxy known to date.

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The properties of M1149-BSG-z5

According to the study, M1149-BSG-z5 has an effective radius of about 8,500 light-years, and its spiral arms extend to a radius of some 17,900 light-years. The mass of the galaxy was estimated to be 28 billion solar masses, and its star-formation rate was found to be at a level of 144 solar masses per year.

Furthermore, the study found that M1149-BSG-z5 hosts an active galactic nucleus (AGN), with a relatively low black-hole-to-stellar mass ratio of about 0.001. This is lower than those of many high-redshift AGNs and comparable to local AGNs.

The astronomers conclude that the properties of M1149-BSG-z5, together with its high metallicity (about 50% solar) and its location on the BPT (Baldwin, Phillips, and Terlevich) diagram, which is used to determine whether a galaxy's gas is being ionized by intense star formation or by an active, supermassive black hole, make it a high-redshift massive, chemically evolved galaxy.

When compared with other galaxies, M1149-BSG-z5 turns out to be larger than typical galaxies at a redshift of about 5.0 and comparable to barred galaxies with redshifts between 2.0 and 4.0. The authors of the paper note that the nearest galaxy to M1149-BSG-z5 is about 69,000 light-years away, which suggests that interaction may play a role in the bar formation of the newly detected system.​

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Source

https://phys.org/news/2026-07-jwst-barred-spiral-galaxy.html?utm_source=webpush&utm_medium=push

Paper

https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25022

2M1207 b (red dot) is five times more massive than Jupiter, orbiting the brown dwarf 2M1207 (center). The system is 230 light years from Earth

CREDIT - ESO

Credit: Chris Ratzlaff

Credit: NASA/JPL

Credit: Harlan Thomas