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Ryan Kinnett

@rkinnett.bsky.social
2.2K followers 236 following 282 posts

Spacecraft systems engineer, amateur astrophotographer, general space nerd

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Reposted by Ryan Kinnett
Simeon Schmauß @stim3on.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Six months have passed since the #ArtemisII mission and NASA has just released the reentry video from the Orion capsule! Here is a timelapse of the reentry, but be sure to check out the realtime version linked below! 🔭🧪
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SkyCalPro | Kev @skycalpro.com · 30/09/2026
Today: Lunar libration maximum toward the South #Astronomy #Moon
Lunar libration maximum toward the S
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Ryan Kinnett @rkinnett.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
NGC-7635, the Bubble Nebula in Cassiopeia, ~7100 light-years away. The shell is formed by intense stellar winds, estimated around 4 million mph, emanating from a hot 45-Solar-mass star interacting with regional gas and dust. Imaged from Stony Ridge Observatory on Thursday night. #Astrophotography 🔭
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Dominique Boutigny @alvindediaspar.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Yesterday I made a few images of the supernova Ia 2026aaiv which was discovered by ATLAS on September 1st in NGC 7331 (44 Mly from us). This animation blinks my image against a ZTF reference. 🔭 🧪
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Ryan Kinnett @rkinnett.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Cygnus Wall, imaged from my driveway on Tuesday night and artificially set into motion with SETI Astro Suite software. 🔭 GSO 8” f/4 #Astrophotography
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Robert Simmon @rsimmon.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
I am having a particularly frustrating week, so here’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. The eruption of Sarychev Peak in the Aleutian Islands, seen by the crew of the space station. www.nasa.gov/image-articl...
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Ryan Kinnett @rkinnett.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Seen enough #LunarEclipse shots yet? Imaged near Los Angeles, 8/27/26. #Astrophotography 🔭
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Ryan Kinnett @rkinnett.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
We discovered this asteroid on Tuesday night after its closest approach to Earth. It missed us by a comfortable 16 million km. Good thing, because it’s hefty, around 180 meters in diameter, big enough to cause catastrophic destruction. And we only found it after it passed. 😳
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Ryan Kinnett @rkinnett.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
I co-discovered a near-Earth asteroid last night! Asteroid 2026 Q48 was first sighted by JPL’s automated sky survey, but my follow-up measurements from Stony Ridge Observatory confirmed this object, earning me co-discovery credit. This Apollo-type asteroid crosses Earth’s orbit. #Astronomy 🔭 🧪 ☄️
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Ryan Kinnett @rkinnett.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Comet 10P/Tempel, observed on Fri night from Stony Ridge Observatory. Not an alien spaceship. I checked. This well-known comet was discovered in 1873 and visits every 5.4 years. #Astrophotography 🔭 #Astronomy 🧪
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Ryan Kinnett @rkinnett.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Venus, imaged from Stony Ridge Observatory on Tuesday night, and Saturn, shot on the previous Tuesday night. #TelescopeTuesday 🔭 #Astrophotography
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Jasmine 🌌🔭 @astrojaz.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
CURIOSITY HAS BEEN ON MARS FOR 14 YEARS!! HAPPY LANDIVERSARY CURIOSITY!!
Curiosity Mars rover selfie
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Don Davis @ddavisspaceart.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
51 years ago I painted a trio of Viking related works for NASA HQ including the widely reproduced one of the landing on Mars. I have reimagined the Landing portrayal in updated form using digital methods of visualization and painting. I chose the same angle but with reality replacing anticipation.
This oil painting portrays the Viking 1 landing on Mars, which appeared in countless publications. The story of this work is relayed in an earlier post and is shown here for comparison with the new portrayal of this very view, showing the event as it would have appeared. 
This 1975 anticipatory painting was done with oils on a gesso smoothed 16 X 20 canvas panel, using traditional art methods including a tracing paper guide featured earlier. 
 This work shows in retrospect my ideal of the 'spirit of space art', showing something of a summary of what is known of the subject while conveying what it is about the subject's known or theorized attributes that I find visually compelling. The new digital painting updates that visual impression with one based on our current knowledge. The new digital work was also done at the same size as this one was for possible printing purposes, 16 by 20 inches at 300 DPI.
 #Sciart   In 1976 the pair of Viking spacecraft orbiter/lander combos were sent to Mars. Before Viking, Mars was still largely a place of our imaginations, an unknown that we wrote stories about then studied from Earth and space. The dominance of cratered terrain on the portions of Mars photographed by Mariners 4, 6 and 7 gave an initially Lunar impression of that world, which changed during the development of the Viking lander after Mariner 9 revealed the planet.
 The first landing was aimed for a flat flood plain, judged as a decent place to search for life. The landing date was July 4, however the intended site appeared too rough for comfort in the high quality orbiter photos, causing the landing to wisely be delayed. A smoother site further 'down stream' was found using photo and radar data.
The landing proceeded quite nominally, a magnificent achievement that apparently accounted for what it had to and made it the first time.

The first photo from the surface was a look at a footpad to see how solid the 'footing' appeared. Then a moderate resolution panorama of the surroundings was obtained, first showing the rocks, hills, dunes-and bright sky. The latter was my biggest surprise as a space artist. 

The adjustments to the color balance of the later photos were gradually narrowed down. The ubiquitous dust is planet wide, suspended in the air and coloring the sky a luminous tan ochre. 

This digital painting shows the view a meter above the surface seeing the lander briefly kicking up dust less than a second before touchdown with the footpads 1.4 meters high. The landing rockets were designed with many nozzles to disturb the surroundings as little as possible. The nearby disturbed dust resembles in color that of the sky. We are 6 meters away from the center of the lander. field of view is 60 degrees, we are looking Northwest with the Sun and Earth off the frame to the left.

This is a digital art update of the pre mission oil painting I did for NASA HQ 1n 1975.

  #Sciart
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Riding With Robots @ridingrobots.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
From NASA: Curiosity has delivered a new 360-degree panorama from Mars. “We’ve seen a lot of fascinating landscapes through Curiosity’s eyes, but this sea of polygons took our breath away,” said the mission’s project scientist. Zoom into the rover's latest views: www.nasa.gov/missions/mar...
Panoramic view of a desert landscape with textured ground and distant, layered hills. Part of the rover can be seen in the lower left. Reddish desert terrain textured with a pattern of small, hexagonal raised ridges. Part of the rover can be seen in the lower left. Layered rocks in the foreground and smoother, reddish, tooth-like hills along the distant horizon.A rocky hill about 20 feet (6 meters) tall capped with sand on the pointy top.
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Ryan Kinnett @rkinnett.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
#Aurora detected tonight from Mt Wilson, Los Angeles County (34N latitude) vis UCSD HPWREN cam www.hpwren.ucsd.edu/cameras/#mod...
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Ryan Kinnett @rkinnett.bsky.social · 21/06/2026
Last night a friend (pictured) and I imaged the Moon on 5x7” film at Stony Ridge Observatory. This same telescope and a similar camera was used in the mid-1960s to help map the Moon for the Air Force in support of the Lunar Surveyor and Apollo programs. 🧪 🔭 #Astrophotography
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Kevin M. Gill @kevinmgill.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
A wild workspace in front of the Mars Curiosity Rover following its Sol 4928 drive this week. Check out all those polygonal fractures! flic.kr/p/2sjzEfy
Rocks covered with polygonal fractures that appear to have been filled in with mineral that's more weather resistant than the surrounding matrix.  And sand.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill
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Seán Doran @theseaning.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
'The Solar Serpent' 1,535 images by Jessica Meir are repaired, remastered & retimed to create this film with music by Andreas Vollenweider. Full frame 4k 3x real time video here... youtu.be/riXnbG4ncyg
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Stuart Atkinson @stuartatkinson.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Absolutely stunning views coming back from Curiosity today as she continues on up the valley she's exploring... look at the ground! Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/S Atkinson
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Loren Grush @lorengrush.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
Summary from NASA's moon base announcement today: -- Astrolab and Lunar Outpost are making the LTV rovers -- Blue Origin will be landing those rovers -- Firefly's Elytra is transporting drones to the moon www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
bloomberg.com
NASA Taps Bezos’ Blue Origin, Firefly for Moon Base Contracts
NASA picked Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace and other space firms to send robotic landers, rovers and even drones to the moon as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to jumpstart a lu...
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Daniel Pomarède @pomarede.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
NASA’s MoonFall mission, managed by JPL, will blaze a path for future Artemis Moon missions by sending four propulsive drones to survey the lunar surface around the South Pole ahead of astronauts’ arrival there. www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/moo... #MoonFall #MoonBase #Artemis 🧪🔭
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Andrea Luck @andrealuck.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
A lot of people are still surprised that Mars has clouds, so here’s an album with a few more photos of Martian clouds for the skeptics :) flic.kr/s/aHBqjCUfY1 🧪🔭
flic.kr
Martian Clouds
Explore this photo album by Andrea Luck on Flickr!
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Andrea Luck @andrealuck.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
Mars - Clouds over Terra Cimmeria - ESA Mars Express HRSC Full size 5k image: flic.kr/p/2sdpsHP 🔭🧪 Credit: ESA/DLR/FUBerlin/AndreaLuck CC BY 2025-07-24 South is up HR211_0000 ND3+GR3+BL3
A close view of Mars from orbit, showing a dusty reddish surface covered in impact craters, with thin whitish high altitude clouds stretching along the upper limb of the planet against black space.
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Nick Stevens @nick-stevens.com · 16/05/2026
vimeo.com/1192785015 Animation crossfading between a canal map of Mars, and a modern CGI map, so you can see how the "canals" line up with real features. By me. 2 views, above North and South poles of Mars.
vimeo.com
Historical Mars, Part 2. Antoniadi's canals overlaid on Modern Mars, cross faded..
wo animations of a globe of Mars using Antoniadi’s Mars map labels over a CGI modern Mars, with strengthened colour to show details. Music is "Cloudless", By Cousin Silas, CC licensed.
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Daniel Pomarède @pomarede.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4886-4892: Ingenuity and Perseverance, Curiosity Style "While we know the monikers Ingenuity and Perseverance are attached to our sister helicopter and rover on the Mars 2020 mission, those characteristics were in full force with Curiosity over the past week." #Mars 🧪🔭
science.nasa.gov
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4886-4892: Ingenuity and Perseverance, Curiosity Style - NASA Science
Written by Michelle Minitti, MAHLI Deputy Principal Investigator
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Del - Martian Observer @martian-observer.net · 03/05/2026
Mars Perseverance rover turns up a sticky find Mars Guy Episode 265 / 3rd May, 2026
youtube.com
Unimaginable outcome from Curiosity’s latest drilling attempt
YouTube video by Mars Guy
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Doug Ellison @dougellison.bsky.social · 03/05/2026
Rock off. 🤘
A square black and white fisheye camera view of Mars.   A dark patch from where a rock got picked up, and a broken up rock from where it dropped off a drill visible at the top of frame.
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Jackie Branc @jackiebranc.com · 28/04/2026
🚀 Have you perhaps wondered how the process of producing Andrea Luck’s @andrealuck.bsky.social stunning images of Phobos against the backdrop of Mars—taking into account their relative motion—actually works? 🤭 I have a hypothesis 🔭 I recommend Andrea's album "Phobos" on flickr: flic.kr/s/aHBqjAvrQL
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Ryan Kinnett @rkinnett.bsky.social · 16/04/2026
Merging galaxies NGC-4567 and NGC-4568, imaged from Stony Ridge Observatory on Tuesday night. 🔭 30” f/6, 1 hr integration #Astrophotography
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Tony Dunn @tony873004.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
Artemis II doesn’t reverse direction like its ground track implies. Far out, its motion is mostly radial (toward Earth), so its small eastward speed is slower than Earth’s rotation, so it appears to drift west. Closer in, tangential speed grows and overtakes Earth’s rotation, so it moves east.
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Simeon Schmauß @stim3on.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
Amazing views of the Artemis II launch filmed from NASA's WB-57 high altitude aircraft 🔭🧪 #Artemis Full duration on YouTube: youtu.be/pa-dMk2VnUg
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Mike Boylan-Kolchin @mbkplus.bsky.social · 05/04/2026
In addition to sending folks to circle the Moon, NASA will be launching a telescope (the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope) later this year that has Hubble-quality images over a field of view that is ~100x bigger: 🧪 science.nasa.gov/mission/roma...
A view of the pillars of creation. The view is very large, with a much smaller box indicating the Hubble field of view
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Talia al Ghoul 🏳️‍⚧️ @usili.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
Holy shit, the tracking on this video for the Artemis II launch, is something you all should watch. It gives such a good view of the separation of the solar array covers and launch abort system. www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFKd...
youtube.com
Artemis 2 - Tracking Telescope - Awesome Launch
YouTube video by USLaunchReport
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Ghostblackout🏳️‍🌈 @ghostblackout.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
Posting this here because @nasaspaceflight.com hasn't yet NASA's engineering cameras for #Artemis2 images-assets.nasa.gov/video/KSC-20...
images-assets.nasa.gov
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Scott Tilley @coastal8049.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
First day Doppler analysis of Artemis II.
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Riding With Robots @ridingrobots.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
From NASA From the Moon, a lunar eclipse looks like a total solar eclipse, but it lasts a LOT longer. For NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, that means the team has to plan carefully for the 4 hours that the spacecraft — and its solar panels — will be in the dark and the cold. 🌑🛰
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Adem @adem.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
oh NO
a screenshot of slide 24 of https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/27420372-lunar-trailblazer-anomaly-review-board-report/ stating "A review of the SA [ed: solar array] commanding showed that the gimbal axis for each array was defined using the right-hand-rule pointing away from the vehicle as opposed to into the vehicle."
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Meredith Rawls @merrdiff.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
Alerts are flowing from Rubin Observatory! There will be a proper press release in the coming hours, please see all the details then, and meanwhile, your favorite alert broker probably has public data available to peruse *now*! We are up to well over 20k alerts after 20 min on sky 🔭
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David S. F. Portree @dsfpspacefl1ght.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
Excerpts from a NASA public info publication in my collection. This one, published by NASA in 1972, features the distinctive artwork of Robert McCall. Pre-Internet, these were a major means by which NASA informed the public. I post one of these in its entirety on my Patreon every Sunday.
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DutchSpace @dutchspace.eurosky.social · 14/02/2026
Meanwhile at NASA JSC, Blue Origin MK1 lunar lander, has entered Chamber A for approximately 11 days of TVAC Source: David Limp on the other site.
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Garrett Johnson @gkjohnson.bsky.social · 04/02/2026
I revisited my parallel IK system for the first time in awhile to make some ergonomic improvements & got perf improved by over 50% in some cases 🦾🤖 I still have some more improvements in mind, though, when I have some more time. Repo link below 👇 #threejs #webgl #robotics
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SpaceNews @spacenewsinc.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
Blue Origin halts New Shepard flights Blue Origin announced Jan. 30 that it will halt flights of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle for at least two years as it shifts its focus to human lunar exploration.
spacenews.com
Blue Origin halts New Shepard flights
Blue Origin announced Jan. 30 that it will halt flights of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle for at least two years as it shifts its focus to human lunar exploration.
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SpacePolicyOnline @spacepolicyonline.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
Still no date for WDR or launch, but Artemis II crew is getting ready. Entered quarantine on Friday in Houston. Pending outcome of WDR or other operations considerations they can come out and reenter 14 days before any launch date, flying to KSC 6 days before launch. www.nasa.gov/blogs/missio...
nasa.gov
Artemis II Crew Enters Quarantine Ahead of Journey Around Moon - NASA
The next astronauts to fly around the Moon went into quarantine late Friday.
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Scott Tilley @coastal8049.bsky.social · 25/01/2026
NASA Selects Participants to Track Artemis II Mission. www.nasa.gov/technology/s...
nasa.gov
NASA Selects Participants to Track Artemis II Mission - NASA
NASA has selected 34 global volunteers to track the Orion spacecraft during the crewed Artemis II mission’s journey around the Moon.
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Alec Griffiths @alectrospace1.bsky.social · 23/01/2026
Estes and Blue Origin have been cooking! 👀👀👀👀👀👀👀 estesrockets.com/products/new...
An image of Estes Rocket's new 1/100th scale flying model kit of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket.
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Ryan Kinnett @rkinnett.bsky.social · 19/01/2026
Good chance for #Aurora tonight! I’ll be somewhere in Angeles Forest with cameras ready.
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Derek Newsome @derek.space · 17/01/2026
We're going back.
The Artemis II mission rolling out to Launch Complex 39B

The SLS rocket is stood atop a large grey mobile launcher, with the lower platform adorned by an Artemis flag and a United States of America flag.

A large metal truss tower is behind the rocket, providing vehicle support during launch operations.

Under the launcher is a Crawler Transporter, with 4 sets of tracked carriers moving the rocket at roughly 1 mile per hour.
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David S. F. Portree @dsfpspacefl1ght.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
In the difficult years ahead, we should remember that the snows of Olympus lie silent beneath the stars, waiting for our grandchildren. - Arthur C. Clarke
Mars Express image of Olympus Mons volcano showing frost, 2024
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Scott Kardel aka Palomar Skies @palomarskies.bsky.social · 03/01/2026
Happy Perihelion Day! Today Earth reaches the closest point to the Sun in its orbit. Here are two images I took of the Sun last year showing that the Sun does indeed look a bit bigger in January when we are closest to the Sun than it does in July when we are farthest. 🔭
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Ryan Kinnett @rkinnett.bsky.social · 29/12/2025
Highlights from my space-related endeavors of 2025. New job (same company), observed Supernova SN2025rbs & Comet 3I-ATLAS, & co-discovered a near-Earth object with my kids. Not shown: countless hours developing a telescope dome control system & hunting for asteroids ☄️ #astrophotography 🔭 🧪
youtu.be
My Space Adventures of 2025
YouTube video by Ryan Kinnett
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