Sopaid & Science

23/10/2026

The Night Sky Over Mount Taranaki Turned Into a Highway of Satellites

On the evening of 9 September 2026, New Zealand photographer Brendan Larsen pointed his camera toward the volcanic silhouette of Mount Taranaki and simply left it running. For nearly two hours he captured 578 separate 8-second exposures. When he later stacked and painstakingly masked every trail by hand—a process that took roughly 45 hours—he revealed something startling: an estimated 14,450 satellite trails belonging to about 1,400 individual satellites streaking across the sky above the mountain.

What looks at first like an abstract web of light is a compressed record of real orbital traffic. Many of the trails come from large constellations such as Starlink; others are older satellites, scientific platforms, and debris. Because each exposure lasts only eight seconds, a single satellite can appear multiple times as it crosses the frame, which is why the total number of trails far exceeds the number of distinct objects. Hidden in the same frame are two tiny moving lights on the mountain itself—two climbers descending Taranaki in the dark, their headlamps visible across the entire sequence.

Larsen has emphasized that every trail is real, not AI-generated. The finished composite is both a technical achievement and a quiet document of how rapidly the night sky is changing. A clear evening over a remote New Zealand volcano now contains more moving points of light than most people realize, even if the majority remain invisible to the naked eye without long exposures or careful timing after sunset.

The image is a single evening’s worth of orbital motion made visible—thousands of silent passages above one of New Zealand’s most iconic peaks.

23/10/2026

The Twin Jet Nebula: A Cosmic Butterfly Forged Just 1,200 Years Ago

Far out in the constellation Ophiuchus, about 2,100 light-years from Earth, a dying star system has sculpted one of the most elegant objects in the sky. Known as the Twin Jet Nebula (or PN M2-9, also called Minkowski’s Butterfly), it is a classic bipolar planetary nebula—two graceful, wing-like lobes of glowing gas that look almost perfectly mirrored.

Unlike ordinary planetary nebulae, which are blown by a single star, this one is shaped by a close binary pair. One star, once similar to our Sun, has swollen into a red giant, shed its outer layers, and is now collapsing into a white dwarf. Its companion orbits so tightly that the two may have once shared a common envelope. Their gravity and winds have flung material into a thin, dense disk that acts like a nozzle. Fast stellar winds slam into that disk and are deflected into two opposing, high-speed jets—exactly the way exhaust is channeled in a jet engine.

The result is spectacular: twin lobes of ionized gas racing outward at hundreds of kilometers per second, glowing in intricate colors of oxygen, nitrogen, and other elements. Measurements of how quickly the lobes are expanding show that the outburst that created them happened only about 1,200 years ago—essentially yesterday on cosmic timescales. In that brief span the nebula has already grown into the butterfly shape we see today, still expanding and still being shaped by the orbiting binary at its heart.

Hubble’s images reveal the delicate ripples, knots, and color gradients that make the Twin Jet Nebula look more like a living creature than a cloud of gas. It is a reminder that even the quiet end of a star’s life can produce some of the most beautiful and dynamic structures in the galaxy.
Hubble. ESA

23/10/2026

A leopard watches the sunset, perched high in a tree in the Masai Mara, Kenya.

22/10/2026

Curiosity just sent back a stunning new view of the Red Planet, captured in November. Ancient ridges, dusty plains, and billions of years of history — all in one frame.

22/10/2026

The Bubble Nebula: A Cosmic Soap Bubble Blown by a Titanic Star

7,100 light-years away, a colossal star—45 times the mass of our Sun and blazing with extreme heat—is violently sculpting the surrounding gas. Its fierce stellar winds are inflating a vast, glowing bubble and driving it outward into denser regions of interstellar space, creating the dramatic, shell-like structure we see as the Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635).

How this image was made

Over multiple nights from Abbotsford, British Columbia, light from this distant cosmic bubble was collected through a 115 mm Stellarvue refractor. An Antlia dual narrowband filter isolated the glowing hydrogen and oxygen, and a ZWO ASI2600MC camera recorded five-minute exposures. Guided by a ZWO AM7 mount, the total integration time reached 32 hours.

After careful calibration and stacking in Astro Stack and Astro Wizard, followed by final processing in Photoshop, only the best 25 hours of data survived grading. Those carefully selected frames produced this final portrait of a star still actively reshaping its neighborhood.

Chuck Webb — Abbotsford, BC, Canada

22/10/2026

An incredible example of color changing and camouflage by an octopus filmed off the coast of Mozambique.

21/10/2026

Take the closest look yet at Dione!

Saturn’s fourth-largest moon, captured by the Cassini spacecraft.

Its brilliant icy crust acts like a giant mirror, reflecting so much sunlight that Dione shines as one of the brightest jewels in the outer Solar System — a frozen pearl glowing among Saturn’s rings.

21/10/2026

New Ghosts of Cassiopeia

A hundred hours of patient watching through a narrow filter that catches only the glow of ionized oxygen suddenly pulled three almost invisible phantoms out of the darkness — right next to the famous Ghosts of Cassiopeia, the nebulae IC 59 and IC 63.

Those two have long been known. They bathe in the fierce light of the hot star γ Cassiopeiae. Hydrogen within them flares a deep crimson, while dust softly scatters the starlight, adding a cool bluish-white shimmer. The result is that familiar, almost living ghostly scene that gave them their name.

Objects 1, 2 and 3 are different. They shine a pure blue from ionized oxygen (O III). They are so faint that without the special filter and the long exposure they simply disappeared into the background.

What they are remains a mystery. Object 3 looks like a compressed shock front: γ Cassiopeiae may be plowing through interstellar gas and piling material up ahead of it, like the bow of a fast ship. Object 1 is suspiciously round — it could be a planetary nebula left by a dying star, though no central white dwarf has been found yet. The origins of all three are still unknown.

In one tiny patch of sky the old red ghosts and the new blue ones now share the stage. And they show no sign of revealing their secrets quickly.

21/10/2026

Einstein explains his formula E=mc².

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20/10/2026

А glittering cluster of young stars has blown a ghostly void into the heart of this nebula. In this Hubble Space Telescope view of LHA 120-N44 (also known as N44), the brilliant central stars have driven powerful stellar winds—and, in some cases, supernova blasts—that swept away most of the gas and dust from which they formed. The result is a vast superbubble, a nearly empty cavity roughly 210 by 140 light-years across, ringed by a glowing shell of compressed material.

Using Hubble’s sharp eyes, astronomers surveyed the region and cataloged nearly half a million stars in and around the cluster, including many foreground interlopers and about 30,000 still in their pre-main-sequence phase—stars that have not yet ignited nuclear fusion in their cores. By studying this treasure trove of infant stars, researchers aim to measure how long it takes for cold gas clouds to collapse and finally spark the nuclear fires that turn a collapsing clump into a true star.

Located 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, N44 is a vivid laboratory of star birth, where the same energetic processes that clear the bubble also trigger the next generation of stars along its glowing rim.

Credit: ESA, NASA, D. Gouliermis.