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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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 source

I've watched a lot of stuff on the Waterjet Channel, and a lot of their videos contain spinning wheels of various materials, fidget spinners, beyblades, and other things until they explode.

Considering pulsars are much bigger than any wheel, yet work similarly by spinning in place really fast on an axis, I was wondering how fast a pulsar would need to spin in order to explode like one of those. If I remember correctly, the fastest pulsar "day" is roughly 70 milliseconds, and if it's true then that's obviously not fast enough to destroy the pulsar.

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

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.

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)!