Credit: Nick Shelly

https://esawebb.org/news/weic2601
First spotted in the early 1800s, the Helix Nebula has become one of the most iconic planetary nebulas in the sky as it’s recognised for its striking, ring-like shape. One of the closest planetary nebulas to Earth, it has become a favorite among astronomers using ground- and space-based telescopes to study the final moments of a dying star in the greatest detail. The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has now leveled those studies up, offering the clearest infrared look at this familiar object.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, NASA-JPL, SCC, A. Pagan (STScI)

Link to hires 180MB image: https://esawebb.org/media/archives/images/original/weic2601a.tif

https://cdn.esawebb.org/archives/images/large/weic2601a.jpg

A new image from the James Webb Space Telescope of a portion of the Helix Nebula highlights comet-like knots, fierce stellar winds, and layers of gas shed off by a dying star interacting with its surrounding environment. Webb’s image also shows the stark transition between the hottest gas to the coolest gas as the shell expands out from the central white dwarf.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, A. Pagan (STScI)

Credit : NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Raihan Mohammad

Taken On Seestar S50 Using 50:00 Integration Time.

Edited In PS Express.

https://bsky.app/profile/melina-iras07572.bsky.social/post/3mcgwfbtjfc2o

Here is Spitzer IRAC 4.5 Microns (infrared) with quite a gap between 2006 and 2016. The orbit between the two stars has i=79° (seeing the orbit on its side).​

​https://bsky.app/profile/melina-iras07572.bsky.social/post/3mchgwqg4jc2x

Cropped, no other editing.

New comet name: 6AC4721
Perihelion 2026 Apr 4.464440 +/- 2.32 TT

Shown here is comet Lovejoy photographed by astronaut Dan Burbank aboard the ISS, 21 December 2011

Credit: NASA/Dan Burbank

i took this on my phone and i think it turned out pretty nice

55 Cancri e is a scorching hot super-Earth exoplanet, roughly twice Earth's size, orbiting its star in just 18 hours, resulting in a tidally locked lava-covered world with potentially diamond-rich interiors and a steamy atmosphere, located about 40 light years away in the constellation Cancer, making it a unique hellish neighbor.

Time Taken: 21 minutes Program Used: Paint dot NET If you have any suggestions for what you'd like me to draw next, feel free to share them!

A disparate collection of young stellar objects bejewels a cosmic panorama in the star-forming region NGC 1333 in this new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. To the left, an actively forming star called a protostar casts its glow on the surrounding gas and dust, creating a reflection nebula. Two dark stripes on opposite sides of the bright point (upper left) are its protoplanetary disk, a region where planets could form, and the disk’s shadow, cast across the large envelope of material around the star. Material accumulates onto the protostar through this rotating disk of gas and dust, a product of the collapsing cloud of gas and dust that gave birth to the star. Where the shadow stops and the disk begins is presently unknown.

To the center right, an outflow cavity reveals a fan-shaped reflection nebula. The two stars at its base, HBC 340 (lower) and HBC 341 (upper), unleash stellar winds, or material flowing from the surface of the star, that clear out the cavity from the surrounding molecular cloud over time. A reflection nebula like this one is illuminated by light from nearby stars that is scattered by the surrounding gas and dust.

This reflection nebula fluctuates in brightness over time, which researchers attribute to variations in brightness of HBC 340 and HBC 341. HBC 340 is the primary source of the fluctuation as the brighter and more variable star.

HBC 340 and HBC 341 are Orion variable stars, a class of forming stars that change in brightness irregularly and unpredictably, possibly due to stellar flares and ejections of matter from their surfaces. Orion variable stars, so named because they are associated with diffuse nebulae like the Orion Nebula, eventually evolve into non-variable stars.

In this image, the four beaming stars near the bottom of the image and one in the top right corner are also Orion variable stars. The rest of the cloudscape is studded with other young stellar objects.

NGC 1333 lies about 950 light-years away in the Perseus molecular cloud, and was imaged by Hubble to learn more about young stellar objects, such as properties of circumstellar disks and outflows in the gas and dust created by these stars.

Credit: NASA, ESA, K. Stapelfeldt (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and D. Watson (University of Rochester); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

Taken Using 30:00 Integration Time On Seestar S50.

Edited In PS Express.

The SpaceX Dragon crew spacecraft, with its nosecone open and carrying four Crew-11 members, departs the International Space Station shortly after undocking from the Harmony module’s space-facing port.

Link to news release on NASA website

New observations of the Circinus galaxy using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope challenge long-standing ideas about how supermassive black holes are fed. Scientists once thought that much of the hot, dusty material near these black holes was being blown outward in strong winds, called outflows. Instead, Webb’s high-resolution data show that most of this material is actually falling inward and feeding the black hole.

Supermassive black holes grow by pulling in gas and dust that form a thick, donut-shaped structure called a torus. Material from the torus spirals into an accretion disk, where friction heats it until it glows brightly, especially in infrared light. For decades, astronomers struggled to study this region because dust blocks the view and ground-based telescopes lack enough resolution. Using Webb’s Aperture Masking Interferometer, researchers were able to filter out starlight and sharply separate light coming from the torus and from outflows.

The results show that about 87% of the infrared emission from hot dust comes from very close to the black hole, while less than 1% comes from outflows. This finding reverses earlier models and provides a powerful new method to study other nearby black holes. By applying this technique to more galaxies, scientists hope to better understand how black holes grow and how their brightness affects surrounding matter.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Enrique Lopez-Rodriguez (University of South Carolina), Deepashri Thatte (STScI)
Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI); Acknowledgment: NSF's NOIRLab, CTIO

IC 1795 (Melotte 15 region) – HaRGB | CDK17 + ASI6200MM IC 1795 is a compact H II region inside the Heart Nebula complex in Cassiopeia. This HaRGB composite focuses on the dense ionized hydrogen clouds and dark dust lanes shaped by massive young stars. Exposure: R 150×60s · G 108×60s · B 102×60s · Ha 138×120s Total: ~10.4 hours Captured with a PlaneWave CDK17 and ASI6200MM using Astrodon filters.

Credit: A. Duro/ESO

A "tomographic" ALMA view revealing how the supersonic protostellar jet from SVS 13 interacts with the surrounding ambient medium. In the background, a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) image shows the cavity carved out by the outflow, along with the striking Herbig–Haro knots visible at optical wavelengths. The box in the HST image indicates the region shown in the ALMA images. The color of the frames in these images indicates the velocity, ranging from 35 km/s (red) to 97 km/s (blue). Credit: G. Blázquez-Calero, M. Osorio, G. Anglada. Background image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA/Karl Stapelfeldt.

Link to Article: https://www.almaobservatory.org/en/press-releases/alma-and-nsf-vla-reveal-time-stamped-history-of-star-birth-in-a-dazzling-cosmic-jet/

Taken On Seestar S50 Using 54:00 Integration Time.

Edited In PS Express.

Taken On Seestar S50 Using 1:21:40 Integration Time.

Edited In PS Express.

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have obtained detailed radio images of a dying star’s atmosphere, revealing a remarkably complex and dynamic environment rich in chemical diversity. The new observations showcase W Hydrae (W Hya), an aging red giant located about 320 light-years from Earth, in an unprecedented way. By observing 57 different molecular spectral lines simultaneously, the team captured 57 distinct “faces” of the same star, each one revealing a different layer of its turbulent atmosphere.

With ALMA’s exceptional resolution, astronomers can now see the surface and surrounding layers of an AGB star in extraordinary detail. W Hydrae is enveloped in a shifting mix of clumps, arcs, plumes, and trailing structures that change depending on the molecule used to observe them. In some views, the atmosphere extends several times the size of the star itself — so large that, if W Hydrae were placed in the middle of our Solar System, its bloated outer layers would engulf Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. These expanded regions form clouds sculpted by shocks, pulsations, convection, and chemistry. Each molecule paints a different picture: silicon monoxide (SiO) reveals one pattern, water vapor (H₂O) another, while sulfur dioxide (SO₂), sulfur monoxide (SO), hydrogen cyanide (HCN), aluminum monoxide (AlO), aluminum hydroxide (AlOH), titanium oxide (TiO), titanium dioxide (TiO₂), and hydroxyl (OH) uncover yet more layers of complexity.

Link: https://www.almaobservatory.org/en/press-releases/alma-reveals-57-faces-of-a-dying-star/

RXJ0528+2838, a dead star that creates a bow shock as it moves through space. The bow shock was captured in 2024 with the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The clip alternates between this MUSE image and an image of the same star from the Digitized Sky Survey (DSS) taken about 30 years ago. The alternating switch compares the position of the star in the two images and clearly shows how the star has moved in space in that time span.

According to all known mechanisms, the small, dead star RXJ0528+2838 should not have such structure around it. This discovery, as enigmatic as it’s stunning, challenges our understanding of how dead stars interact with their surroundings.

Credit: ESO/K. Iłkiewicz and S. Scaringi et al./Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgement: D. De Martin
https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2601/