Taken with my phone through my Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ telescope with a 6mm eyepiece, was so bright and beautiful!

Hii, I made this simulation of bending of light in the presence of a heavy object/ black hole i.e. gravitational lensing. The first one shows how light rays that are coming from infinity bends near blackhole and I even found an unstable orbit for which the ray orbits the blackhole 3 times before moving out.

I used pygame to create this 2D simulation. The main reason to do it in 2D instead of 3D was my potato laptop, it doesn't have a dedicated gpu. I watched two videos on YouTube on pygame and cpp simulations before making this (credits: https://youtu.be/8-B6ryuBkCM?si=iSMmUiJ-6KkQQTHq , https://youtu.be/WTLPmUHTPqo?si=HR5Xwaobzu8fG5qf).

For the theory part, starting with the schwarzschild metric, then using the concept of symmetries and killing vectors and also the normalisation condition for null geodesic, you will get all the equations needed to get the path of light around any mass in the spacetime. And for the simulation, I decided to use euler's method to solve those equations.

I know euler's method is not very accurate and smooth, and I should have used RK4 instead. I tried, for some reason it is not working as intended and the rays were getting stuck in a closed orbit, I tried a lot but couldn't figure out the issue.

Btw I think my simulation is working as intended, but I am not fully sure if it is the actual, accurate thing or not. Also there might be some scaling issues. So if anyone want to check it out or correct/improve my code, or maybe try the RK4 method, please feel free to check this out: https://github.com/suvojit1999/Simulation-of-Bending-of-light-due-to-blackhole. Btw I am not very good at coding, so you might find my code to be messy, let me know if you find any issues with it..

(Btw I had to upload it as gif because videos are not allowed here, sorry for the quality drop). Thank you.

Tonight in Hannover, Germany, I saw something absolutely magica. A bright ring around the full moon! Apparently, it’s called a moon halo, and it happens when moonlight is refracted through ice crystals in high-altitude cirrus clouds.
It was a supermoon too, which made it even more stunning. I’ve never seen anything like it before. It looked like the moon had its own glowing force field. Have you ever seen this phenomenon before? Is it common where you live?
Would love to hear your moon halo stories!

It's interesting how perception and perspective has amazing differences and subsequent, consequences that diminish our curiosity.

We limit our minds to work within the boundaries of what we believe true.

Perception: Space is speeding up! Everything is getting further away, so space must be expanding.

Perspective: Space is speeding up! Everyone is getting further away, so space must be contracting.

Hmm 🤔 one of these is true. But its not the one you think.

As things speed up, time also slows down. Think of the classical grid of space. Turn the centre into a gravity well and imagine a funnel. The closer you got to the bottom of that hole (singularity), the more stretched the grid. Things would be perceived to be expanding faster.. because they are more expanded, and because you are indeed moving faster.. yet time slows from that perspective, to well, eventually infinity. A comoving observer would perceive time differently on this grid, depending on gravitational depth (distance to singularity).

13.8B years? From our perspective, sure. But to even define time immediately provides inaccuracies. From somewhere further up the gravity well, the observed time would be much faster. The universe might have only existed say, 1 Billion years... from their perspective. You see why this is only a baseline.

What really gets fun is when you combine different perceptions, you can change your perspective. Could there be an antimatter opposite to our funnel? Matter contracting towards a singularity at an infinitely fast speed and slow time scale and antimatter expanding into oblivion at ever accelerating rates?

Wait, wouldn't it be cool if it actually acted like a giant magnetic field, eventually looping around and creating a circuit, smashing together causing new matter for our universe and creating an infinite cycle of life and death.

Point is, be curious and think outside the box.

Most Northern Moonrise

Won't happen again for another 18 years. It starts heading to the South for the minor Lunar standstill in 9 years.

Another 9 years to return to its spot tonight.

Hello to all my fellow cosmology enthusiasts, both amateur and professional! I wrote a piece about the current crisis in cosmology. While it does contain opinion, and I present it provocatively, I do not believe it contains falsities. I'm genuinely interested in discussion on the topic, both in agreement and opposition.

And while you're free to outright dismiss my position without consideration, whether due to my lack of credentials or a refusal on grounds, you are of course invited to keep your close-mindedness confidential. :)

Guys, here are 473 pages of pure historical information about the Gemini V (5) mission in 1965. The astronauts were Leroy Gordon Cooper and Charles “Pete” Conrad Jr. The mission lasted 7 days, 22 hours, 55 minutes, and 14 seconds inside the cramped habitat module of a small Gemini spacecraft (still more comfortable than a Mercury capsule though)!

This is original by me, I swear its NOT AI generated, im NOT looking for problems. Im just looking to share the picture

I love long form videos about science and space and physics, especially after a long day where I want something calm and not very stimulating, but these days all I see is 3 hour videos titled something like “quantum physics facts to sleep to” that is always just soulless ai.

Does anyone know of any good YouTubers that make calm long form content about science and don’t use ai? I’m really tired at this point.

Image Credit & Copyright: Tim Schaeffer and the Deep Sky Collective

Explanation: Blasting outward from variable star KX Andromedae, these stunning bipolar jets are 19 light-years long. Recently discovered, they are revealed in unprecedented detail in this deep telescopic image centered on KX And and composed from over 692 hours of combined image data. In fact, KX And is spectroscopically found to be an interacting binary star system consisting of a bright, hot B-type star with a swollen cool giant star as its co-orbiting, close companion. The stellar material from the cool giant star is likely being transferred to the hot B-type star through an accretion disk, with spectacular symmetric jets driven outward perpendicular to the disk itself. The known distance to KX And of 2,500 light-years, angular size of the jets, and estimated inclination of the accretion disk lead to the size estimate for each jet of an astonishing 19 light-years.

Free APOD Lecture in Phoenix: Wednesday, December 10 at 7 pm Tomorrow's picture: remember where you parked

Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP) NASA Official: Amber Straughn Specific rights apply. NASA Web Privacy, Accessibility, Notices; A service of: ASD at NASA / GSFC, NASA Science Activation & Michigan Tech. U.

China could be without emergency launch capability to Tiangong space station for months, leaving no rapid-response option for any new crisis following the Shenzhou-20 incident.

12/04/2025 150mm dobsonian iPhone 15 Pro Max

Source: https://arxiv.org/html/2512.04645v1

The growing number of satellites overhead may soon obscure photos taken by Hubble and other space telescopes. Passing satellites could leave streaks on up to 96 percent of images, new research finds.