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joncst.bsky.social
@joncst.bsky.social
230 followers 210 following 520 posts
Amateur Astronomer, Esperantist.

Por-gxua astronomisto, esperantisto.
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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
Doh! For some reason i read M44 as M41. Apologies.

Here's an actual image of M44, with Bonus Mars and Satellite.

20ish minutes with #Seestar S50 🔭
M44, the Beehive cluster, spreads across the field of view as strings of widely separated but bright stars, with lots of fainter stars in the background. At top right, the planet Mars glows (overexposed), and a satellite photobombs from the upper center down to the left.
September 30, 2025 at 3:08 AM
joncst.bsky.social
Like many "close" open clusters, it can benefit from a wider field of view. Here's the same cluster at a lower power, allowing some more of the clusters stars in the image.

M41 lives in Canis Major, & gives some idea of what M42 (the Orion nebula) will look like when it grows up.
#seestar S50 🔭
Open cluter M41 in Canis Major appears as a set of stars concentrated towards the center of the image, but stretching nearly side-to-side, and occupying about a 1/3 of the image field of view.
September 30, 2025 at 1:26 AM
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
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
Sometimes the objects are basically invisible, particularly at the low magnification given by the #Seestar.
At the center of the image, globular cluster 6760 is barely visible, as basically an eraser smudge. Open cluster NGC 6709 is a large, triangle-shaped group of stars at the center of the image. About 2-dozen stars are fairly easy to attribute to the cluster. This cluster would almost certainly be worth visiting with an 8" or larger scope. At the center of the image, planetary nebula 6772 is pretty much invisible. If it wasn't with a circle and its name, you probably wouldn't notice it. The low magnification of the S50 means it doesn't make the object big enough to see.
September 5, 2025 at 3:30 AM
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
joncst.bsky.social
Despite a waxing moon, M26 (The Dumbell Nebula) looks quite good. 30 minutes with a #Seestar S50 🔭

Spite de kreskante luno, M26 aperas bele. Tridek Minutoj.
M27, the Dumbell Nebula, close multicolored against a starry background. In this image space isn't dark, because the waxing moon is giving a reddish-brown hue. The nebula itself looks a bit like an apple core turned sideways in the image. There are two rims of redish at eiter side. Whitish green stretches a between the rims, narrowing towards where they meet. Green puffs spill out the top and bottom.
September 4, 2025 at 2:39 AM
joncst.bsky.social
Because Lyra is fairly far from the first quarter moon, here's 20 minutes on the Ring Nebula with a #Seestar S50. Bubble of gas, glowing in the light of a white dwarf at the center.
against a dark background, stars are sprinkled, At the center is a colored donut, or perhaps a bagel: the Ring nebula. It is the outer layers of a star, blown off at the end of its life to form a bubble of gas. At the center, too small to be seen at this scale, is a white dwarf. Energy from this star makes the gasses glow.
September 3, 2025 at 1:36 AM
joncst.bsky.social
Hitch-hiker on our tractor.

#treefrog. #frog
August 31, 2025 at 9:39 PM
joncst.bsky.social
Hieraŭ cxielarkon mi vidis...
Ĉi-vespere mi vidis maldikan kurban lunon
Ĉielarko kurbas super kamparo. A rainbow curves above a farm. Maldika kurba luno en malheliĝa ĉielo, super tri arboj kaj blanka domo, A thin curved moon in a darkening sky, above three trees and a white house
August 27, 2025 at 4:30 AM
joncst.bsky.social
The assembled flock on the pasture beyond the pond.
August 26, 2025 at 3:49 AM