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No, no! They're countless septillions of small pieces of ice and rock dust. They're totally not solid. (The bits what comprise them are, and they'll shred you yessir.)

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They're out there right now waiting

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No. They'd fall apart like a shitty Soviet car. Plus you'd accelerate towards the ring plane and start to be shredded by all the little dickhead particles. You'd die in like, four different ways. You would, however, probably get a school named after you.

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Read more: science.nasa.gov/photojournal... Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

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This is NASA Photojournal image PIA11668, taken by the Cassini spacecraft on 26 July 2009. At the time, the Sun was almost exactly aligned with the rings, enabling Cassini to image the shadows from these icy towers. The towers themselves are hard to see, pointing almost directly up at the camera.

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This is a photograph of the edge of one of Saturn's rings, looking down from above. Those spiky dark shapes are shadows. Shadows of giant towers of ice and dust grains clumped together that rise up to three *kilometres* above the 10-m thick rings.

A series of bands cross the image from left to right, brighter at the bottom and darkening towards the top. A band of empty space is at the top of the image. About a quarter down from the top is a complex pattern of jagged, spiky shadows cast onto the rings. The icy towers casting the shadows are seen here at a highly oblique angle.

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Reposted by Paul Byrne

This is gravitational lensing. Where the a bunch of galaxies are so, so massive they distort the fabric of spacetime itself, and bend the light from background galaxies billions of lightyears more distant.

From the source: "A massive galaxy cluster, made of many golden elliptical galaxies with the largest, brightest one in the centre. Heavily distorted orange galaxies appear all around the cluster, the largest concentrated in a large arc around the cluster's centre; these are images of very distant galaxies, created by gravitational lensing. A few galaxies are large and bluish-white in colour; bright, nearby stars are the same colour."

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Filters > Distort > Remove Spacetime Fuckup

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And the bright, multi-pointed features are stars within our own galaxy. Read more about this image: esawebb.org/images/potm2... Image credit: ESA/Webb/NASA/CSA/L. Furtak/S. Fujimoto

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This is a JWST view of the galaxy cluster MACS J0454.1-0300, the bright, glowing yellow features, which is a vast set of galaxies about 8 billion lightyears away. The orange, smeared features are gravitationally distorted views of much, much farther galaxies. Blue galaxies are closer to us.

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Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · 20h

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lmao what a stupid comment This is a European mission. They have healthcare there. Here in the US we choose to not have healthcare. Space has nothing to do with it Really stupid Facebook-level comment

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Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · 22h

I recognize that phrase in the title; from Star Wars, is it?

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Reposted by Paul Byrne

This is a photo of our home planet taken only a few hours ago! So what? We have photos of Earth taken from space every day. Ah, but *this* photo was taken by a spacecraft ON ITS WAY TO JUPITER.

From the source: "Mostly black space, most of Earth visible at the top right of the image. Part of a spacecraft visible on the left."

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We live in a remarkable time in human history!

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Read more: www.esa.int/Science_Expl... Image credit: ESA/Juice/JMC (Acknowledgement: Simeon Schmauß)

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This image was taken by ESA's Juice spacecraft with one of its engineering cameras just before 2:00 pm CEST today, 28 September 2026. In this view the spacecraft is moving away from Earth, but will return for another gravity assist in 2029. The southern portion of the African continent is visible.

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Paul Voosen @voosen.me · 28/09/2026

This is a photo of our home planet taken only a few hours ago! So what? We have photos of Earth taken from space every day. Ah, but *this* photo was taken by a spacecraft ON ITS WAY TO JUPITER.

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Reposted by Paul Byrne

New Horizons is now *three days away* from shutting off its two heliophysics instruments, simply because NASA has not provided the $2M in funding it had promised to the mission last year or this year. There is no science basis for shutting these off. Our earlier coverage:

science.org

NASA’s New Horizons mission may shut down two instruments over lack of funding

Decision risks “incalculable loss” of data from the edge of the Sun’s influence, scientists say

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Reposted by Paul Byrne

These are what the clouds on Jupiter look up close. The small patches of white are cloud tops, soaring above the main, colourful cloud layer. Image from NASA's Juno spacecraft during its 38th close approach to Jupiter on 29 November 2021, processed by Kevin Gill (@kevinmgill.bsky.social)

A complex, swirling pattern of lighter and darker clouds. One large system, angled to the upper left in this scene, is a tawny brown colour and is elongate. Another, more circular storm system is at lower centre, and is a grey–greenish colour. The background swirls are various shades of grey to blue; small, white features dot the scene.

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I don't. Probably a few hundred km, but that's a guess.

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Reposted by Paul Byrne

China Space Watch @chinaspace.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Like, this is an area about TWO PERCENT of the total scene. By my count, there's around 10 stars local to the Milky Way in this view. EVERYTHING ELSE IS A GALAXY

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Reposted by Paul Byrne

China’s Tiangong Space Station crosses in front of Jupiter in this remarkable astrophotography shot. Just hundreds of kilometres above Earth, Tiangong appears in front of Jupiter, a world hundreds of millions of kilometres away. Captured by 沈老思347

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Sure, the clouds wouldn't be as bright, no. But as I noted in the post, it's more an artistic take than a scientifically robust rendering. (I blended the two images in Photoshop; hardly scientifically quantitative.)

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Sure, for a galaxy. But for globular clusters, there'd be physically more photons hitting you so being in the galactic core would mean a brighter night sky.

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Let me put it another way: we can happily use solar panels in on spacecraft in the inner Solar System. We can't in the outer Solar System.

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Do you find a street light brighter from far away or from directly under it?

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Reposted by Paul Byrne

This is a quick workup of what the night sky might look like on a world close to the galactic core. The planet is a rendering by Martin Kornmesser, to which I added the JWST image. So this scene is suggestive more than scientifically accurate. But still... imagine growing up under a sky like this.

The fore- and middle ground shows a rendering of a rocky exoplanet surface. The JWST Sagittarius scene from the first post occupies the upper half of the image.

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Reposted by Paul Byrne

Gary Hershorn @garyhershorn.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

The @stsci.edu posted this JWST image from 2023 earlier today—and I had to do the same. This is only a portion (about 50 lightyears across) of the Milky Way's centre. In this view, there's an estimated half-million stars. In our night sky, at a dark site, humans can see ~2,000 stars unaided.

From the source: "In a field crowded with stars, a funnel-shaped region of space appears darker than its surroundings with fewer stars. It is wider at the top edge of the image, narrowing towards the bottom. Toward the narrow end of this dark region a small clump of red and white appears to shoot out streamers upward and left. A large, bright cyan-colored area surrounds the lower portion of the funnel-shaped dark area, forming a rough U shape. The cyan-coloured area has needle-like, linear structures and becomes more diffuse in the center of the image. The right side of the image is dominated by clouds of orange and red, with a purple haze."

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Reposted by Paul Byrne

Crazy light across Manhattan with a rainbow as the sun set ahead of an approaching nor'easter storm in New York City, Friday evening #newyorkcity #nyc #newyork #sunset #noreaster #rainbow

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Read more about how the JWST image was acquired, and what it tells us: science.nasa.gov/asset/webb/s... JWST image credit: Image: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/S. Crowe Exoplanet image credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

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I love love love these pics

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Reposted by Paul Byrne

This is a SMALL version of the largest JWST image released so far—of IC 348, a star-forming region about 1,000 lightyears away. Open up the image and marvel in the incredible beauty even in our galactic neighbourhood. This is what it looks like when stars are born.

From the source: "A star-forming region. It is blanketed in thick clouds of gas and dust, millions of kilometres across, that form swirling patterns. Bright stars are scattered throughout the clouds, with the densest cluster situated in the centre of the scene. Each is crowned with six long points created by the optics of the telescope’s mirrors. In the upper right, a couple of hidden stars blast out long, glowing jets of material."

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Like, this is an area about TWO PERCENT of the total scene. By my count, there's around 10 stars local to the Milky Way in this view. EVERYTHING ELSE IS A GALAXY

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That really is pedantry, and doesn't add anything to our understanding of the cosmos—but *does* detract from the incredible achievement of the JWST telescope and science team. None of these data are false, just because we can't see in these wavelengths. Shitty comment on your part.

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The yellow–green–brown feature is a veil of dust and gas from which the stars condense; bluer dust is at the upper right. The total field of is about 16 × 20 arcminutes. See the original figure here: esawebb.org/images/weic2... Credit: ESA/Webb/NASA/CSA/K. Luhman/C. Alves De Oliveira/M. Zamani

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This image is 4,000 × 3,232 pixels; the original is 30,866 × 38,204 px. It's ABSURDLY huge. In this scene, stars are bright, multi-pointed features. There are also some objects called Herbig-Haro objects (upper right), where protostars eject powerful jets that ram into and heat up gas and dust.

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Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · 23/09/2026

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Reposted by Paul Byrne

Another stunner from JWST—this time part of a *much* larger scene I'll post later. This portion is made up of stars and protostars in a cluster about 1,000 lightyears from Earth. The bright, multi-point features are nearby stars. The smaller features in the background are other galaxies.

From the source: "A star-forming nebula that contains young stars called protostars. Two of these protostars are shooting out long jets that are colliding with the nebula, creating glowing, colourful outflows. A few other protostars create orange and red areas in the nebula. Most of the image is covered by blue gas, with brighter areas, denser clouds and dark gaps; the bottom-left corner contains greenish-yellow gas."

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