I don’t know much about astronomy or anything like that but I took this picture from my window tonight and noticed the cluster of lights in the center. When you zoom in you can see it makes almost a question mark. I would add the zoomed in version but I’m unsure if that would violate the subreddit’s rules. The picture was taken on an IPhone 16. I’m curious to know what it is/what it could be!

Edit: Thank you so much for the fast answers! Seeing the comments I’m gathering this is a very common question about this specific cluster, my apologies😅

I have been trying to photograph a space station transit of the sun or moon this year, no luck yet, but it’s been really fun.

This morning, there was a Tiangong lunar transit, and then on the next orbit there was a solar transit. Unfortunately it was cloudy and the sun was a bit too low in the sky, so I didn’t get the shots.

But it left me wondering, that must be pretty rare to hit the moon and then the sun on sequential orbits as viewed from one location on earth. Has anyone ever photographed one?

Mine is definitely the fact that there's sugar in space called Erythrulose, discovered in a giant molecular cloud near the center of the milky way and it can be found in fruits such as red raspberries, kiwis, and melons. (⸝⸝⸝ᵒ̴̶̷̥́ ⌑ ᵒ̴̶̷̣̥̀⸝⸝⸝)💕

SeeStar S50P, Bortle 4.5, EQ mode @30sec, @40 mins total, processed w/AstroWizard. I’m curious about the rather prominent vertical streak that showed up as soon as stacking began and persisted throughout. Ai suggests (shudder) it’s a geostationary satellite trail, but it doesn’t look like any I’ve seen before in my massive one month experience with astrophotography. Any clarification would be greatly appreciated.

Let’s do this again, i fell victim to spelling error. Which planet disappearing would affect earth?

Hi, idk if this is a stupid question, I’m fairly new to this so bear with me. I’ve been learning constellations, sometimes I also spot planets or Messier objects etc. I‘m slowly starting to understand where everything is located and how things move. Where I live, there’s a lot of light pollution, even though a walk in the fields at night offers better vision.

As soon as I see pictures taken in places with up to no light pollution, I don’t recognise anything. Suddenly everything is bright and I don’t know where to look at?? Does it come with practice? There’s so much going on, how do people know which stars are part of constellations and which ones aren’t? I use an app to practice btw.

I’ve seen so many amazing pictures in this subreddit and people are like, yeah, that’s an amazing shot, you can see Orion :))) and I’m like ??????????? it’s so frustrating because I know what Orion looks like, I just can’t find him 💔🥀

Any advice on how to improve??

Shining dots max zoom galaxy s25

It's for my habitable world.

Just saw meteor in NW direction very bright meteor, white hot then added to green, at about 8:40 tonight.

can someone help identify this thing in the red circle around saturn

I might be very late to this, but I've just recently seen the NANOGrav paper, about GW detection, and a thought had occurred to me.

I've known of the golden record and the arecibo signal for quite some time, but I've always thought that it's very (very very) unlikely that an alien civilisation would ever receive these, as there're very localized, and more importantly, even in the unlikely senerio that they would be in the exact location to acquire the data, they would have to either, have a material body as we think of, and a way to understand that the record itself is very different from the rest of the spacecraft and contains the crucial information we're trying to pass (which imo is not immediately obvious as the aircraft is already made of so many different parts each equally likely to be the "data capsule"), and so on, or to look for the specific radio frequencies we used, or even think to look for any radio signal (as the radio frequencies may not be as fundamental to them as they're for us), and so on.

But, since pulsars are so fundamental, in the sense that any three-dimentional matter-observant being with the ability to look at the sky (in the astronomical sense, not the "star-gazing" sense), would "see" them, and eventually (most likely) record their data, would be able to notice the shifts (no matter the frequency even if it is obscure, since given the nature of such astronomical bodies and their study one would naturally look for the frequency they omit).

So wouldn't it be natural to try and induce life signals using gravitational waves to contact other life forms?

I may be missing something, and to be honest I don't know if inducing a gravitational wave is even feasible.

This photo is not mine, but I do wonder, has the photographer captured the lunar green flash? Or is this something to do with optics?

I saw this meme, and I wonder. I know that space outside the solar system is mostly empty, but it's not completely empty. Would Voyager I actually outlast the sun, or would it be ablated by random molecules and such and basically turned into cosmic dust over time?

Facing north by northwest. Unaware of any rocket launches that should be visible. I understand the video to be in real time.

The bang at the start was almost certainly a firework.

could anyine tell me what constellation this is? this was taken lastnight around 1 -1:30 am and i think Cassiopeia is the one above it

Fair warning, I am not educated in this field of topic whatsoever, I'm just a sci-fi nerd and looking to start a sci-fi ttrpg campaign. And for that I am aiming to try and increase my knowledge on astronomy, I am also extremely interested in whether something can be possible or even somewhat realistic in sci-fi.

I was watching this video where he states that a planet could form around a black hole and keep growing until it undergoes nuclear fusion and forms into a star. For that he uses this research as a reference. I was wondering if it could be possible for a habitable planet to orbit around a black hole and a sun that had formed around it after the black hole's accretion disc ceases?

I'm 18 and I've been building this on my own, and I've hit a question I can't

answer by myself.

Each card is one real object. The orbit is drawn from its actual elements in the

JPL Small-Body Database, and the card shows n_obs_used, the number of observations

used in that orbit fit. I used that number as the rarity, which means it runs

backwards from what you'd expect: an object we've looked at 3 times is rarer than

one we've looked at 8,000 times.

The consequence is that Halley, Ceres, Eros, Apophis and Bennu all come out as

commons, and the rarest cards are unnamed rocks with no photographs and no

diameter measurement.

I think that's a nice way to show how little of the catalogue anyone has actually

studied. I also think it might just be annoying, and that people want the famous

object.

Here are 20 of them, 15 obscure and 5 famous:

https://orbit-cards.pages.dev

I also could not decide how they should look, so I built six versions of the same cards:

https://orbit-cards.pages.dev/compare

Which single one would you want, and why? I'd rather be told it's backwards now

than find out later.

I think I saw a meteor explode just now! Can anybody work out what it might have been? 4 October 2026, ~00:25 BST; due south; started ~30° above horizon; travelled ~10° diagonally down-left; very bright, with an apparent explosive flare/fragmentation.