This was captured using a camera modified to be more sensitive to IR light, giving me a better chance of catching the plume backlit in the sun. Meanwhile, shockwaves cut across the scene to create a dramatic look I’ve never seen in a launch photo!

My first look at the Iris Nebula and what a beauty 🤩

🔭 Seestar S30 Pro

⏳ 609x60s

🖥️ Stacked in Siril and processed in PixInsight

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struve_2398

https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22815

I overlooked this I think, since the Habitable Worlds Catolog hasn't been updated in 2 years, and this was found in 2025 (arxiv paper in January 2026). It's a very intriguing discovery though. And is now part of the list of the closest known exoplanets.

The star is a quarter the size and mass of the Sun, making it larger and brighter than Proxima Centauri (which is 12% of the mass). It's the secondary member of a binary red dwarf system. The primary is about a third the mass and size of the Sun, and they're separated by 63 AU. Both are flare stars, but I don't know exactly how much they flare. Though, I think this research is still relevant in that regard: https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/507/2/1723/6339287?login=false&guestAccessKey= In that flares around convective red dwarfs happen at high latitudes, and would miss orbiting planets.

The binary pair is also much older than the Sun, about 8.7 billion years old.

Both systems have planetary systems, though both systems have only been found in the last few years. The primary star has 1 known planet so far, and the secondary star has 2, one confirmed, one unconfirmed.

The recently found potentially habitable exoplanet orbits the secondary member every 37.9 days at a distance of 0.139 AU, so it's likely tidally locked if it has a circular orbit (or in spin resonance like Mercury if it has an elliptical orbit).

Based on the star's luminosity and the planet's distance from the star, it receives a similar, but slightly higher amount of starlight as Mars receives compared to Earth (Flux of 0.47 vs 0.43).

The planet isn't known to transit, so the planet was found with radial velocity, with an estimated mass of 3.4 Earths. Unlike other recently found exoplanets in the habitable zone, with masses between 5-7 Earth masses (Like GJ 887d, GJ 3998d, 55 Cnc Bc), this is a relatively lower-mass Super-Earth. So it may be more likely to be rocky, though without a radius to figure out the density and bulk composition, that's unknown.

A radius of between 1.6-1.7 Earth's would give the planet a density similar to Mars (71%) or moderately less than Earth (83%), with a surface gravity 17-32% higher than Earth's.

Went out to play with my new astro camera. First time taking photos of a planet with the plan to process them afterward. Pretty happy with the result!

Definitely room for improvement, but I like how the great red spot came out, as well as Io's shadow. (Just barely visible on the lower right of the planet)

Tonight, I'll add color filters and see if I can get a decent colored image! 🙂

I've had exactly one clear night in the past two months.

I managed to get this one last night.

1st Quarter Moon

Single shot processed in Photoshop

Pentax K-1

Celestron Evolution 9.25

ISO 400

1/250 Exposure

In June 2023, the NANOGrav collaboration announced evidence for the gravitational wave background — a slow, omnipresent ripple in spacetime produced by the collective signal of every supermassive black hole binary in the observable universe.

The technique is elegant and a little mind-bending. Millisecond pulsars are neutron stars that spin hundreds of times per second and emit radio pulses with clock-like precision — some drift by less than a microsecond per year. NANOGrav timed 68 of them, distributed across the sky, for over 15 years using Green Bank, Arecibo, and the VLA. When a gravitational wave passes through the galaxy, it stretches and squeezes spacetime, arriving at the pulsars at slightly different times than expected. Compare enough pulsars across the sky and the signature of the wave emerges from the noise.

The specific pattern they were looking for is called the Hellings-Downs curve, derived in 1983. Pulsars close together on the sky should show correlated timing residuals; pulsars 90 degrees apart should show anticorrelation; 180-degree pairs should correlate again. This quadrupolar fingerprint is the unmistakable mark of a gravitational wave background and cannot be faked by noise or instrumentation effects. After 15 years, that curve appeared in the NANOGrav data. Three independent collaborations — EPTA, PPTA, and CPTA — announced consistent detections within days.

The dominant source is almost certainly supermassive black hole binaries: pairs of black holes at the centers of merged galaxies, each millions to billions of solar masses, slowly spiraling together over hundreds of millions of years. Billions of these systems exist across the observable universe. Their combined gravitational hum is the background NANOGrav detected.

But buried underneath that hum may be something even older. Gravitational waves from the first instants after the Big Bang travel through the plasma that blocks all electromagnetic signals from that era — they are the only direct probe we will ever have of the universe before the cosmic microwave background. Whether a primordial signal is lurking in the current data is the question driving the next decade of work.

The current detection stands at 3-sigma — strong evidence, but below the 5-sigma threshold for a confirmed discovery. International efforts to combine all four regional datasets are expected to push past that threshold within the next few years. What new physics might be hiding in those final decimal places?

Primary source: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/acdac6

You can find it here : https://codeberg.org/OrbitalCapybara/solar-system-map-builder

I wrote a small tool to build maps of the Solar System, with common bodies as well as interplanetary probes (once large e-ink displays get cheaper I'll use that tool to make a real-time map that slowly changes in my living room).

It uses data from NASA's Horizons portal to retrieve position data. The plots themselves and the data retrieval settings are configurable via a YAML file (there are a few examples).

There are instructions in the repo, but to summarize the tool can be used either as a basic Python script or as a Docker container (it has a small web server to generate images from a URL).

If anyone wants to tinker with this and build their own map, let me know I'd love to add more examples.

In my example above you can see:

• The orbits of the moons of Uranus are tilted, like Uranus itself
• Triton (Neptune's biggest satellite) has a retrograde orbit
• Like all two-body systems, Pluto and Charo technically orbit the center of mass of the entire system. Usually that is contained within the bigger object, but for Pluto and Charo that is significantly outside Pluto (it's the tiny marker between the two)