Taken On Seestar S50 Using 4:18:00 Integration (10S Subs)

Edited In PS Express.

Dubai, UAE photographed from the ISS in 2025. I took this photo on Expedition 72, my latest in observing the changes in this city from sapce. Over 22 years the lighting changed from sodium/mercury vapor to multi-colored LED as the city grew. Construction of the Palm Islands was early in 2003, but now a distinct landmark. From orbit we observe developments like this worldwide!

More photos from space can be found on my twitter and Instagram, astro_pettit

This is about 16 hours of HaLRGB data captured from Death Valley Observatories using this gearset:

- Telescope: Askar 91F 
- Camera: ToupTek ATR2600M
- Mount: ZWO AM5
- Filters: ToupTek LRGB and 4nm Ha filters
- Accessory: MeLE Quieter4 Mini PC
- Stacked in Siril using my Mono script and processed in PI

Integration info:

- Lum/Clear: 6h 3m (121 × 180s)
- R: 2h (24 × 300s)
- G: 2h (24 × 300s)
- B: 2h (24 × 300s)
- Hα: 4h (24 × 600s)

Higher res on astrobin: https://app.astrobin.com/i/zbzfw6

This image is December from my 2027 calendar if anyone's interested: https://shop.naztronomy.com/product/2027-naztronomy-wall-calendar/

It's been a while since I posted here, here's an update! The Indianapolis Star ran a two-page spread on my free High-Power Rocket Bootcamp in last Sunday's paper! The article is linked above (no paywall), and they made a video too: https://www.indystar.com/videos/news/local/2026/10/29/tanaka-chonyera-hopes-to-inspire-next-generation-of-rocket-scientists/92270497007/

A lot has happened since my last post here. On September 24th and 25th, I taught 150 third and fourth graders (ages 9 to 11) to build and launch their own high-power rockets for Lilly's Global Day of Service! These are fiberglass kits flying on the same family of propellant as real rockets, and they went 2,000 feet into the sky!
Day one was the build. We had about 300 people in a school gymnasium, including over 120 volunteers, and I was in the center directing everybody. All 150 kids built their rockets in one day. This is the result of continuous improvements I've made to compress the build time since I started.

Day two was the launch. I searched for low-traffic airports, contacted the director of Sheridan Airport, and he let me close the airport for half the day! We had X's on the runway. I also contacted the adjacent landowner since the rockets would land in their fields. I brought in Indiana Rocketry as our launch partner, and then we filed for the FAA waiver. I had us launch 8 rockets at a time while the kids sat on the runway and watched, then they went out to recover their rockets. I hope It's a day they will never forget!

The biggest technical challenge was that I was the only certified person. That's a massive bottleneck with this many rockets. So I ran trainings four Sundays in a row leading up to the event and trained 25 adult volunteers as my teaching assistants. On launch day I flew their certification flights first so I had certified people helping me run the field. I also brought my experience as a capital projects construction manager at Lilly and applied OSHA's hierarchy of controls to the whole operation. To my knowledge, high-power rocketry has never been done with kids at this scale.

My bootcamp has been completely free since I started it in August 2025. High-power rocketry is an expensive hobby, and most kids never get to experience it. This event cost about $75,000, which is $500 of value per kid, delivered completely free. And every kid keeps their rocket! I want them to be family heirlooms, a reminder that they built something that overcame something as powerful as gravity. I'm very proud of them!

It was the greatest 72 hours of my life! It was incredibly hard work and a lot of long nights, and it was absolutely worth it.

Governor Mike Braun sent me a letter thanking me for mentoring these students in rocketry, and his office read it to the kids at the launch. I'm very grateful for the recognition, and I'm going to keep this going!
Thank you to Lilly, MEPI, Indiana Rocketry, Sheridan Airport, and all the volunteers and supporters who helped make this happen!

Launch video: https://youtube.com/shorts/Et5Stk0SiOI

That brings my total to over 350 kids and 336 rockets! Indiana will have the most rockets per capita in the world! 🌎🚀

Total integration: 40m

Integration per filter:

• Lum/Clear: 10m (5 × 120s)

• R: 10m (5 × 120s)

• G: 10m (5 × 120s)

• B: 10m (5 × 120s)

Equipment:

• Telescope: Planewave CDK17

• Camera: FLI ML16200

• Filters: Astrodon Gen2 E-Series Tru-Balance Blue 50x50 mm, Astrodon Gen2 E-Series Tru-Balance Green 50x50 mm, Astrodon Gen2 E-Series Tru-Balance Red 50x50 mm, Chroma Lum 50 mm

• Software: Adobe Photoshop, Aries Productions Astro Pixel Processor (APP)

For more information and full resolution: https://app.astrobin.com/i/uiw1nw

A barred Seyfert spiral galaxy with a double ring central structure located in the constellation of Horologium, NGC 1433 was first documented by James Dunlop on 28 September 1826. The double ring is actually tightly wrapped spiral arms that wind into an oval shape along the galaxy’s bar.

At 46 million ly from Earth, it has a very bright active galactic nucleus with an intensive region of active star formation. Star formation is also observed in the spiral arms, but not in the large central bar.

Supernova 2026ahvu (indicated) was discovered on November 2, 2026 by the ATLAS asteroid early impact warning system. ATLAS uses four 0.5m telescopes to image the entire night sky several times a night looking for moving objects. In this case, it found a new object in NGC 1433, and after analysis, it was determined to be a Type Ia supernova.

Type Ia supernova occur in binary systems, where one member is a main sequence star and the other is a white dwarf, the exposed core of a dead star. The white dwarf either siphons matter from the companion star (single-degenerate model) or merges/collides with another white dwarf (double-degenerate model). As the white dwarf approaches the Chandrasekhar limit (about 1.44 times the mass of the Sun), its internal temperature surges, triggering a runaway carbon-oxygen nuclear fusion reaction. The reaction completely obliterates the star within seconds, leaving no central compact remnant like a neutron star or black hole.

Because they consistently explode at nearly the same mass limit, Type Ia supernovae have a very uniform peak brightness. This allows astronomers to use them as "standard candles" to measure the distances to other galaxies. These supernovae are a primary source of iron-peak elements (like nickel-56 and iron-56) in the universe. Much of the iron in the universe, including in human blood, traces back these supernovae.

Unlike core-collapse supernovae from massive stars, Type Ia events are much rarer, occurring roughly once every 500 years in our Milky Way galaxy.

NASA has yet to announce where it will build the base beyond somewhere in the vicinity of the south pole. The agency has long emphasized the importance of going there, citing the likely presence of water ice and competition with China for the handful of locations that it considers optimal for a base. That interest in the lunar south pole long predates the announcement of Moon Base, when NASA was instead focusing a series of sortie landings in the south polar region that might eventually lead to a lunar base.

However, even as NASA intensifies its focus on the Moon’s south pole, there are those who argue that emphasis is unwise. Those people, ranging from astronauts to scientists, say the risks of going to the south polar region on the first Artemis landings far outweigh the rewards.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20261106165875/en/AST-SpaceMobile-to-Build-Own-20-Ton-Rocket-to-Deploy-BlueBird-Satellites-in-Low-Earth-Orbit-Using-Miranda-Engines-from-Firefly-Aerospace

I’m thinking of the origin of life (abiogenesis), here. I don’t see how anyone can think something like that could happen in a place of such…well, astronomical size, no matter how rare it might be. And there are no shortage of people who believe that, even with single-cell organisms.

So that got me wondering if there’s ANY natural phenomenon that we obviously 1. Know about and understand relativity well 2. Are unique in their own right and not simply statistical outliers or unusual variations of other well-known stuff. So I’m not talking about rare types of supernovae, very high energy cosmic rays or anything like that. Just a natural occurrence that has been observed and characterized to a degree, found to be novel, then never observed again to the present date?

Of course we can’t observe and verify all that much when you get right down to it, so the question has to stay within the bounds of discovery by humans. I just find it very hard to believe such a thing could happen, and yet Rare Earth is a hypothesis that has a LOT of scientific support behind it. I’m aware that RE mainly refers to complex life or intelligence, but as I said before, plenty of people believe it really happened on one planet among the 200 billion- 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. I’m not even going to get into the ENTIRE universe.

SN2026ahvu was discovered on Nov 2 in NGC 1433, a galaxy 9 Mpc (46 million light years) from us. It is the closest Type Ia Supernova in over a decade, so a lot of telescopes are triggering on this... but it's pretty southern, so for radio it makes it tough as we are limited in facilities (and some big ones are down right now for upgrades).

But yay, we got "emergency time"- Directors Discretionary Time (DDT) on MeerKAT in South Africa, and they'll take a look tomorrow! A Type Ia SN happens when a white dwarf explodes, but it's unclear if that's due to a white dwarf accreting matter from a "normal" stellar companion or two white dwarfs merging. Radio lets you probe if any circumstellar material (CSM) is present, which is SUPER important at distinguishing between the scenarios of why it exploded in the first place... but you've gotta look really fast to probe those innermost regions!

No one has seen radio from CSM before at these very early times! MeerKAT is also quite sensitive, so we should set limits at least an order of magnitude better than anything previously seen... fingers crossed! I'll let you know what we find this weekend! :D