A lot of those tubes run on the inside of the engine. They’re 3D printed into the engine walls as it’s being made

They transmit T cruzi (Chagas’ disease), which can cause heart failure

Looks like a $843 million contract to deorbit it sometime in 2030, and the deorbit vehicle is going to burn up as well. They could maybe just send up a starship without any tiles/flaps at that point? Hopefully some of these commercial LEO stations really get going before then to replace it...

They at least have an ISS live stream going most of the time, but it's pretty boring at night or when they lose coverage

Could you edit your equipment out of your title?

Also any and all astro photos are allowed here, regardless of how “low effort” they are (as long as they follow the couple rules on the sidebar. I don’t want there to be any kind of arbitrary minimum quality standard to prevent people from posting their space photos on here.

The saturation is increased, but looking at the moon through a telescope you can barely see some faint blue/tan colorations that line up with this pic. The blue areas have more titanium minerals and the tan/orange areas have more iron

So it turns out camera sensors are perfectly fine being exposed to the last ~20 seconds of sunlight before an eclipse. I’ve decided that if I still have this cam in 2045 I’m going to sacrifice it to the sun by not putting the filter back on after totality, and letting it document its own demise.

I'm still kinda upset that it clouded over at the last minute during the 2017 eclipse. I had my camera set up to take a bunch of exposures for HDR throughout totality, and this was really the only one that turned out. Hopefully it'll be clear this time and I can get a proper HDR image, but I'm not looking forward to driving 6+ hours back home (not including eclipse traffic).

Also for anyone else who saw the last eclipse, did the dumb lizard part of your brain freak out a little when you saw stars out at 2pm or was it just me?

They shut it down last September. It’s nsfw spinoff redgifs is still up.

Astrophotography. Hell, just photography in general.

Although the Orion Nebula is a popular beginner astrophotography target, it can be difficult to shoot because of the bright core. Combining images with different exposure lengths into an HDR image is necessary in order to properly expose for the faint dust surrounding M42 and the bright nebulosity near the trapezium cluster in the core. I opted to go for a more subtle HDR look with this one, which I think is more visually pleasing than some other overcooked HDR images (aka my previous attempt at it). Also for those interested I made a short time lapse of my telescope in action photographing this. Captured on January 22, 23, and February 7th, 2021 from a Bortle 6 zone (Probably higher local bortle level due to streetlamp at the south end of my driveway)

Places where I host my other images:

Instagram | Flickr

Equipment:

• TPO 6" F/4 Imaging Newtonian

• Orion Sirius EQ-G

• ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro

• Skywatcher Quattro Coma Corrector

• ZWO EFW 8x1.25"/31mm

• Astronomik LRGB+CLS Filters- 31mm

• Astrodon 31mm Ha 5nm, Oiii 3nm, Sii 5nm

• Agena 50mm Deluxe Straight-Through Guide Scope

• ZWO ASI-120MC for guiding

• Moonlite Autofocuser

Acquisition: 5 hours 54 minutes (Camera at Unity Gain, -20°C)

• L- 109x120" + 50x15" + 50x5"

• R- 23x120" + 25x15"

• G- 23x120" + 25x15"

• B- 22x120" + 25x15"

• Darks- 30

• Flats- 30 per filter

Capture Software:

• Captured using N.I.N.A. and PHD2 for guiding and dithering.

PixInsight Processing:

• BatchPreProcessing

• StarAlignment

• Blink

• ImageIntegration

• DrizzleIntegration per stack per channel (2x, Var β=1.5)

• HDRComposition per filter to make 64-bit HDR images

• DynamicCrop

• DynamicBackgroundExtraction

Luminance:

• EZ Deconvolution

• EZ Denoise

• STF applied via HistogramTransformation to make nonlinear

RGB:

• ChannelCombination to combine monochrome R, G, and B HDR stacks into color image

• DynamicBackgroundExtraction

• PhotometricColorCalibration

• SCNR to partially remove greens

• HSV repair to saturate clipped star cores

• Linked STF applied via HistogramTransformation to make nonlinear

Nonlinear:

• EZ HDR applied to reveal detail in blown out core per Luminance and RGB images

I opted to only mix 10% of the HDR image back in the original luminance. Wanted to go with a more subtle HDR look that didn't feel too 'overcooked' while keeping some of the nebulosity near the trapezium visible in the final image.

• LRGBCombination to add lum image as a luminance layer to the RGB image

• CurveTransformation to adjust lightness, contrast, and saturation

• ACDNR

• LocalHistogramTransformation

• HistogramTransformation to slightly stretch image

• Another Curve for saturation boost

• EZ Star Reduction

• Resample to 78%

• Annotation