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joncst.bsky.social
@joncst.bsky.social
230 followers 210 following 530 posts
Amateur Astronomer, Esperantist.

Por-gxua astronomisto, esperantisto.
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joncst.bsky.social
Weird snow. Some places the grass pokes through. Other places the drifts pile high. Out the window along our roof.
In a photo taken through a window, giving a grey cross-hatch effect, visible past the window latch and (fake) window leading, a several-foot high (just under a meter for those using sensible measuring systems) drift of snow rises on the roof, next to but not touching, the white vinyl siding of the house. An adjacent part of the roof has been swept clear of snow by the wind, which apparently deposited it on the drift.
February 1, 2026 at 4:06 PM
joncst.bsky.social
Every year, a bunch of #vultures come to our barn, morning and evening. They don't actually live here, we think they just come here to warm up in the morning and evening sun. When I go to feed the horses, a dozen or two of the #birds will fly off the barn and perch in the trees along the pasture.
Outlined against a clear blue winter sky, hree turkey vultures perch in the bare trees above our Quonset Hunt barn. I'm hiding while I take the picture so I don't spook them away. Out of sight behind the barn to the right are many more vultures in other trees.
January 28, 2026 at 1:49 PM
joncst.bsky.social
Weather change coming: 23º halo around the moon, with Jupiter just inside at the top.
Nearly-full moon at center, in a glory, inside a 23 degree halo. Jupiter is inside the halo at top. A blue internal reflection is below and to the left of the moon, and is an artifact of the inexpensive cell-phone camera.
January 5, 2026 at 3:43 AM
joncst.bsky.social
NGC 55 / C72: The "String of Pearls" galaxy. #Seestar S50🔭 16 min vs 20 min wall-clock. "Denoised" & adjusted brightness & contrast to bring out arms.

Not included in the H400, so surprised me to see such a large bright galaxy. I like the differing densities and lengths of the left vs. right arm.
in a dark field with small faint stars scattered, a galaxy spans the frame from left to right. The galaxy is nearly edge-on, and rotated with respect to the frame in the 8 o'clock to 2 o'clock direction. The bright core is small, and surrounded by an oval of spiral arms, then much dimmer arms extend left and right. The right arm is much shorter and thinner than the left. Both arms show variations in size and density, with the left arm shining and fading, the recovering and extending nearly as far as the rest of the galaxy.
January 3, 2026 at 3:48 AM
joncst.bsky.social
NGC NGC 2261 (Hubble's Variable Nebula, C46), imaged with a #Seestar S50 🔭. Pictures before & after using the S50's AI denoising and brightness / contrast settings. Imaged for Astronomical League's "Caldwell" observing program (www.astroleague.org/caldwell-obs...). 15 min @ 10 sec in alt-az mode.
in the middle of a star-strewn astro image, a comet-like nebula grows from a narrow apex (pointing down and right) to a wider fan, then fades to a pale remnant. A long pale spike extends from the left-most corner of the fan to about the same length as the main body of the nebula. This is the un-modified image as originally captured. in the middle of a star-strewn astro image, a comet-like nebula grows from a narrow apex (pointing down and right) to a wider fan, then fades to a pale remnant. A long pale spike extends from the left-most corner of the fan to about the same length as the main body of the nebula. This is the edited image, cleaned up using "AI denoise" and using contrast and brightness adjustments to make the nebula image stand out more from the background.
December 30, 2025 at 5:17 PM
joncst.bsky.social
Barnard 139 is the elongated dark patch near the center of the image. It looks a bit like a squid swimming down & left, with tentacles stretching up & right.
The star field is quite dense: this is in the middle of the summer Milky Way.
October 17, 2025 at 3:37 AM
joncst.bsky.social
Dark Nebula B 335, taken in a 20 minute exposure (of which 15 minutes of 20-second frames were stacked) with a #Seestar S50 🔭. The original image was quite blue. I used the apps "AI Denoise", then tweaked the brightness and contrast to make the nebula stand out more.
An image of a dense starfield, with hundreds of faint stars with a few brighter ones, contains a small dark blot. This is dark nebula Barnard 335, a cloud of gas and dust blocking the light of the background stars.
October 16, 2025 at 12:33 AM
joncst.bsky.social
Green tree #frogs having a convention tonight.
In a scene lit by a night-sky friendly light, three green treefrogs are waiting for bugs. Two are on a screen door panel off its track and leaning against the house. The third is on the wall.
October 14, 2025 at 12:56 AM
joncst.bsky.social
Usagi is a charter member of the Dead Worm Appreciation Society.

#dog #GreatPyrenees
October 10, 2025 at 5:01 PM
joncst.bsky.social
Amazingly good image taken during the full moon. NGC 188 (also C1) was about as far from the moon as was possible, and i did tweak the contrast a bit to highlight the cluster stars, but still: this was taken during Full Moon!
NGC 188 (also called Caldwell 1) is at the center of the frame. About 100 dim stars are sprinkled over the field, covering about 1/2 of the frame from side to side, and about 1/3 from top to bottom,
October 7, 2025 at 10:56 PM
joncst.bsky.social
#proofOfCat

This is Meep, our 16 year old cat, grumpy from being woken from a nap. Her name is the only thing she could say when we rescued her from a dog, 16 years ago.
A white cat with black patches on her head, body, and tail lies curled up on a multicolored striped towel.
October 6, 2025 at 3:33 AM
joncst.bsky.social
First clear night in a week or so. In-between objects on the Dark Nebula and Caldwell observing programs, so i hit a couple of "Tonight's Best" with the #seestar S50 🔭. NGC 253 is a lovely galaxy- hard to belive i never observed it 'til a year ago. NGC 6960 is a segment of the Veil nebula.
against a dark field of dark space, with a few stars scattered across it, the Sculptor galaxy (NGC 253, also known as Caldwell 64) stretches diagonally across the field from upper middle left to lower middle right. The galaxy is tilted nearly edge-on, but a lot of internal structure is visible, especially dark blots where gas and dust blot out the stars in the galaxy's arms. NGC 6960 is a portion of the Veil nebula, an enormous planetary nebula remnant, The whole nebula is essentially a ring, but it has broken into segments as it expanded. Many portions of the ring have their own NGC numbers. This chunk is sometimes called the "Witch's Broom". In this image, i crowded it over to the right side of the image to try and catch the many small dim blobs and whorls to the left and below the main "broom". The broom itself is rather bendy, and splits at into a fork the bottom end. There are many colors, mainly red and green, spread both on the body of the broom and in the "froth" below and behind the broom.
October 3, 2025 at 3:40 AM
joncst.bsky.social
This was about two feet (.7 m) above the ground, attached to several stalks of golden rod. Anybody have speculation about what kind of #bird made this #birdnest?
In a field of yellow blooming goldenrod a birds nest is woven around several stalks. The nest is a lovely cup shaped construct.
October 2, 2025 at 2:34 PM
joncst.bsky.social
A rather blurry picture of a spider whose GREEEEN fangs were gleaming in the sun.
#spider
On a gnarled fence post a black and white jumping spider is tucked into a recess. Its extremely green fangs were gleaming in the sun. In fact, the intense green color was what made me notice the spider on the post.
October 2, 2025 at 2:19 PM
joncst.bsky.social
Dark nebula Barnard 92, taken with a #seestar S50 🔭

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnard...
Barnard 92 is a cloud of gas and dust blocking the light of the stars in the Small Sagittarius Star Cloud. Because of the star cloud, the background of the image is very, very full of faint stars, with a few brigher ones scattered about. The dark nebula is somewhat oval, oriented up and down at the center of the image, with a flattened area at the bottom and less dark extentions reaching the right edge of the image.
September 30, 2025 at 1:18 AM
joncst.bsky.social
Handrail #frog. These are slimy when you find them in the dark going up the stairs.
“#Blenophobia” fear of slimy textures.
A small green tree front is sitting on a handrail. It is in perfect position to accidentally run your hand over it.
September 24, 2025 at 4:50 AM
joncst.bsky.social
We have horse, er, cattle egrets in our pasture. The horses (who play nose hockey with the turtles who wander in there) don't seem to care about the egrets.
at the edge of a field of grass with white farm buildings in the background, a dark horse is grazing head downward. Several white cattle egrets are hunting bugs stirred up by the horse's movements.
September 23, 2025 at 12:47 PM
joncst.bsky.social
M 11, the Wild Ducks, taken while i waited for it to get dark enough to try a Huge Mosaic of the Pipe nebula (which failed).

Under some conditions, visually in a modest sized telescope, M 11 looks like a V of waterfowl (which is where the "Wild Ducks" came from).
An astroimage of M 11, the Wild Ducks. M11 is an open cluster, which means in contains a fairly low number of stars (under 1000), as compared to globular clusters, which can contain hundreds of thousands of stars. This frame contains many background stars because the cluster is in a rich arm of the Milky Way galaxy. The cluster ins at the center of the image, and is quite rich and moderately concentrated. There is an outer halo of stars, more or less round. inside the halo the stars grow more concentrated, and appear to have straight lines on three sides, amost a parallelagram. The innermost part of the cluster shows a pattern almost like a tiny cat, standing facing left, but looking out at you looking at it.
September 21, 2025 at 1:17 AM
Reposted
astrorich.bsky.social
Announcing the discovery of the Possum Nebula tucked in between the North America and Pelican nebula. The search is on for the Raccoon Nebula. #stars #humor #milkyway #funny #astronomy
September 14, 2025 at 2:09 PM
joncst.bsky.social
Good choice!
astropotamus.com Astropotamus 🔭🦛 @astropotamus.com · Sep 13
IC 1318. Butterfly nebula. 🌌🔭🦛
Preliminary image of the butterfly nebula
September 13, 2025 at 4:31 PM
joncst.bsky.social
#TCrB still hadn't become a nova as of last night...
At the center of the image, a small dim star still hasn't gone nova.
September 6, 2025 at 1:23 AM
joncst.bsky.social
Mi trovis verdan araneon. I found a green spider.
Jen verda araneo, kun longaj krurojn kaj pinta korpo, Here's a green spider, with long legs and a pointy body.
September 6, 2025 at 1:20 AM
joncst.bsky.social
Ĉi vi deziras ion legi en #esperanto? Jen retejo kun multaj senkostaj legindaĵoj:

libro.ee/index.php
Libro
libro.ee
September 5, 2025 at 1:00 PM
joncst.bsky.social
I like to take very short exposures of objects with the #Seestar S50 🔭, to approximate what you can see through a modest (8-10 inch) scope. Well, those are modest sizes nowadays, given the prevalence of foot-wide and larger scopes. 30 seconds on most objects is about right.
At the center of the image is a very small globular cluster, looking mostly like an eraser smudge At the center of the image is the open cluster M11, one of the best and brightest in the northern hemisphere sky. It is one of the few objects which look as good in telescopes as it does in (short exposure) images. At the center of the image is open cluster 6704, which is barely detectable against the background stars. Open cluster 6664 occupies most of the center of the image, containing about 30 obvious stars distributed in a squashed semi-circle. The brightish star at extreme right is a foreground star not associated with the cluster.
September 5, 2025 at 3:30 AM
joncst.bsky.social
Region around 𝛾 Cygni (Sadr). A difuse nebula around the star, with many dark nebulae superimposed.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_C...

30 minutes with #Seestar S50 🔭
A bright, overexposed star is at the center of the image. Immediately to the right of the star is a tiny red nebula, about 1/3 the size of the the star, Surrounding the star throughout the image are redish clouds of gas, with dark nebulae superimposed, blocking the light of the clouds. In addition to the random background stars scattered, there is a small open cluster at the bottom left of the image.
September 4, 2025 at 3:10 AM