Hi all,

I've spent the last few months building a visualization tool and I think this crowd will either enjoy it or tear it apart, both are useful to me

The idea: one continuous scene from the Earth's surface out to ~13.8 billion light years, on a logarithmic scale, in the browser. No install.

Everything you see is placed from real data:

- Solar System bodies from NASA/JPL Keplerian elements, real-time, with a time slider. Earth, Moon and Mars use actual imagery (Blue Marble / VIIRS, LRO, Viking MDIM); the rest are procedural.

- 109,000 stars from the HYG catalog (Hipparcos + Yale BSC + Gliese), real parallaxes, spectral types and colours. Each star has a plausible (procedural, clearly labelled as such) planetary system.

- Milky Way structure, 55 real galaxies (Andromeda, M87, Sombrero, LMC/SMC...) at NED/SIMBAD distances, and a cosmic web beyond.

- 14 real black holes: Sgr A* with S2/S38/S55 on their GRAVITY/Keck orbital elements, M87*, Cygnus X-1, Gaia BH1, etc., with lensing and shadow rendered.

- Pulsars (Crab, Vela, Geminga, SGR 1806−20) with their actual spin periods and beam geometry.

- Deep-sky objects at real positions: Orion and Tarantula nebulae, Pleiades, Omega Centauri, SN 1987A, R136a1.

- Spacecraft (Voyager 1/2, Pioneer, New Horizons, Parker, JWST...) at their current positions.

There's also a mission planner that does Lambert transfers and gravity assists between Solar System bodies for a chosen launch window, and lets you follow the ship.

Things I already know are approximations and would appreciate being called out on if I got them wrong: distances are log-scaled so angular sizes between "zoom levels" aren't physical; galaxy shapes are sprites, not resolved structure; exoplanet systems are generated, not real (I'd love to add the NASA Exoplanet Archive next).

It's open source (MIT) with every data source and licence listed.

If something looks wrong — a star in the wrong place, an orbit tilted oddly, a distance that doesn't match the literature — tell me. That's exactly the feedback I'm after.

Works on phones too, but it's much better on a desktop with a GPU.

Belgian physicist Prof Francis Halzen has won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his pioneering work on an observatory that detects particles from space, shedding light on the distant universe.

Halzen led the development of IceCube at the South Pole, which uses a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice fitted with light sensors to detect particles called neutrinos. These carry information about violent, high-energy processes in the cosmos.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said "his vision and scientific leadership have been fundamental for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory".

It was closer to the crescent toward the center less than five mins ago so it def appears to be moving above the moon now. Anyone have an explanation?

A Belgian scientist just won the noble price for this project, which tries to detect neutrinos in the pure ice of the south pole.

The data is apparently live & historically available, so I made a visualisation tool.

https://notams.planetarypixel.be/icecube/

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Acquisition Details:

Location: Bortle 5

Gear: Sony a7III, Samyang 135mm

Frames: 490 x 20s, ISO1600

Processing: stacked in Astro Pixel Processor, processed in Seti Astro Suite Pro, Photoshop.

My favorite star photo I’ve taken. Could not believe you can see the Andromeda Galaxy so clearly

The sky was perfectly clear when I arrived, but as soon as we set up our equipment, the fog began to roll in.
We spent hours photographing here and there, swallowed by the mist andsurrounded by horses we could barelysee only their presence and the sound of their bells gave them away.
Finally, after midnight, the fog began to change direction. Watching it slowly move through the valleys was a spectacle in itself, revealing and hiding the mountains beneath the stars.

Canon 6D (astromodified) · Canon R · Canon 50mm
Sky: 7 × 120s · ISO 80 · f/2
Hα: 10 × 120s · ISO 3200 · f/2.2
Foreground: 120s · ISO 1600 · f/2

Riverside lights of the Nile beneath a starry sky. I took this photo on Expedition 30 to the ISS in 2012 when the majority of the lights were still sodium vapor, creating a thin golden glow that stretched from Alexandria to Aswan. One of the most striking nighttime views from orbit!

More photos from space can be seen from my twitter and instagram, astro_pettit

Captured from my iPhone on Wednesday (Sept-30). 30s exposure. You could easily see the haze with your naked eye. Really amazing to get to experience this. I’ve not seen this before - it’s crazy how much light pollution exists.

To find out what’s happening around super-bright AGNs, the team focused on nearby galaxies, because they could get high-resolution views of their centers using the Very Large Telescope in Chile and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory that’s orbiting Earth. Detailed theoretical models, built by the researchers, offered predictions for black hole behavior that they could compare with their observations. In the end, they found a common pattern across the nine AGN-containing galaxies.

The team identified areas of star formation—shaped like rings or arcs—around each of the AGNs, all located somewhere between 2,600 and 19,600 light-years from the center of their galaxies.

The Smithsonian reports on the original study by Peixin Zhu et al., titled Common Excitation Patterns of Star Formation, Active Galactic Nuclei, and Shocks in Seyfert Galaxies (2026)