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#spacescience

4 posts4 participants1 post today
Public
Mark McCaughrean

If I was being generous here, I could agree that this is the first direct image of this specific exoplanet, TWA-7b 👍

But it’s certainly not the first direct image of an exoplanet or even the first one imaged by JWST 🙄

There’s something about the JWST x exoplanet combo that seems to generate endless misleading clickbait headlines, undermining the genuinely good science being done 🤷‍♂️

theguardian.com/science/2025/j

The original paper by Lagrange et al.:
nature.com/articles/s41586-025

The image depicts the James Webb Space Telescope in a large indoor facility, with its distinctive golden, hexagonal segmented mirror visible. Several technicians in white protective suits are working around it, indicating ongoing testing. The newspaper headline below highlights that this telescope has captured the “first direct images of an exoplanet”.
#SpaceScience
Public
Mark McCaughrean

Hot pictures for a hot afternoon 🥵

Most of the images in my book, "111 Places in Space That You Must Not Miss", came from space agencies & observatories, as well as talented archive image processors & amateur astronomers, most released with CC licences.

But I made quite a few too, also processing archival data, from my JWST observations, or from my back garden.

I've made them all available with CC BY-SA licences here:
flic.kr/s/aHBqjCbdAn

#SpaceScience
#111PlacesInSpace

An image of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko seen from the ESA Rosetta spacecraft in 2015. The comet's coma is spread in all directions around the comet, and the comet is casting a shadow on the coma towards the top of the image, with the sunlight coming from below. The image is originally monochrome and has been colourised with a blue palette.
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AllanICarswellObservatory
Who doesn't love space? It captures our imaginations and makes us wonder if we are truly alone.
Join us for a fair of astronomical proportions at York University with the Allan I Carswell Observatory and our event partners. A single ticket will get you entry to booths, activities, telescopes, and the Astronomy in Action Planetarium.
This exciting event is running as a FIRST CLEAR DAY event as it will be outdoors and under the open air between June 24 - July 4. The event will happen only once on the first clear day, and all ticket holders will see a go or no-go update (depending on the weather) both on the event website and via their registration email by 9am each day.
We are excited to welcome you to walk through the solar system, investigate sundials, and interact with both science and games in this event. All areas are suitable for ages 5 and up, but younger children should be accompanied by an adult.
For tickets and information see: https://www.yorku.ca/science/observatory/astrofair/

Curious about what makes Astro Fair so special? Check out our spotlight in YFile!
https://www.yorku.ca/yfile/2025/06/18/open-air-astro-fair-fosters-learning-local-support-for-york-u-observatory/

#AstroFair #AstronomyEvent #FamilyFun #ScienceFestival #YorkU #AllanICarswellObservatory #Stargazing #SolarViewing #Sunspots #Planetarium #HandsOnScience #ScienceOutreach #STEMEducation #TorontoEvents #ThingsToDoToronto #SpaceScience #AstronomyForEveryone #ObservatoryEvents #ClearSkies #TelescopeViews #ExploreTheUniverse #AstronomerLife #YorkUObservatory #AICO
#aico
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Mark McCaughrean

“So, hands up who thinks Mark’s new book is groovy?” 👋

Thank you very much to ESA Director General, Josef Aschbacher, for his enthusiastic endorsement of “111 Places in Space You Must Not Miss” at the Paris Air Show today, publication day 🙂

(Truth be told, he was actually speaking after my talk & asking which of the kids in the audience would like to be an astronaut, but the picture taken by Karen O’Flaherty was too perfect not to use 🤪)

#SpaceScience 🛰️
#111PlacesInSpace ✨
#LeBourget ✈️

A picture of a man in a blue suit standing with one hand in the air in front of an LED screen showing a book covering. There are kids in the audience in the foreground.
Public
Mark McCaughrean

Just passing through Mannheim, to connect to the TGV direct to Paris 🚅

Will be going out to Le Bourget tomorrow to give a talk at the Paris Air Show.

It’s supposed to cover the science highlights from the roughly fifty space science missions ESA has built and/or collaborated on over the Agency’s half century history 🚀🛰️📡✨🪐💫

All in twenty five minutes 🙀

#Photography 📷
#SpaceScience 🌞

A blue-tinted monochrome image of the interior of the Mannheim main station, showing lots of glass and steel, with the station clock at the bottom. The intensities have been inverted.
Public
Mark McCaughrean

Just two days now until my book, "111 Places in Space You Must Not Miss" is published in Europe 🎉

As you might have guessed, there are 111 mini-chapters, each comprising around 350 words of text & a full-page image describing somewhere interesting in space 🪐🧐

Here are all 111 of those images ... well, at least a central 20 pixel wide strip of each one 🤪

Europe: 19 Jun
UK: 21 Jul
US: 2 Sep

Available from all the usual places and:
emons-verlag.de/p/111-places-i

#SpaceScience 🚀🛰️
#111PlacesInSpace ✨

A portrait format image comprising 111 individual vertical strips cut from larger images. The strips contain a wide range of colours, from reds, to blues, to greys, and a fair amount of black – it is a book about space, after all.
Public
Mark McCaughrean

Millions of degrees hot off the press – first results from ESA's PROBA-3 mission, using two spacecraft separated by 150 metres to create artificial solar eclipses.

This makes it possible to trace the solar corona close to the surface of the Sun on a routine basis, not just during actual eclipses.

Congratulations to the PROBA-3 team 👍

Image taken on 23 May 2025:
Inner yellow: PROBA-2 SWAP
Middle green: PROBA-3 ASPIICS
Outer red: SOHO LASCO C2

#SpaceScience

esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space

A multi-coloured high-energy image of the Sun, comprising parts taken by three satellites, each sensitive to a different part of the Sun and its extended corona. The inner part shows the disk of the Sun in yellow; the middle part is green showing the inner corona; the outer part is reddish, showing the more distant corona.
Public
Mark McCaughrean

Apropos space missions studying the Sun's poles, here's a little something from 6 October 1990.

The deployment of the ESA/NASA Ulysses mission from space shuttle Discovery as part of STS-41.

The spacecraft is at top left of the IUS/PAM-S combo, which powered it towards Jupiter.

There it used a big gravity assist to get out of the ecliptic & orbit over the north & south poles of the Sun.

My slight reprocessing of this JPG scan of the film original: catalog.archives.gov/id/225877

An image of dark space with a cloudy white and blue Earth at the bottom and a white and yellow spacecraft in the middle towards the top.
#SpaceScience
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Mark McCaughrean

In just under a fortnight, on 19 June, my book "111 Places in Space That You Must Not Miss", will be published by Emons in Germany, followed by the UK on 21 July & the US on 2 September 🪐✨📕

It's a tour guide of interesting places in our Solar System, the Milky Way, & Deep Space beyond, & describes what you'd find & learn if you were able to visit them 🙂

Here's a preview of the cover & a few chapters – it's available to order in all the usual places 🙇‍♂️

#SpaceScience
#ShamelessSelfPromotion

An image of a 3D mockup of my book, its cover showing a colourful star-forming region (the Carina Nebula in the infrared) with an astronaut (Bruce McCandless) floating in front of the nebula and title.
A screenshot of a chapter from my book about dust devils on Mars. On the right-hand side, there is a black and white image of the surface of Mars taken by the HiRISE camera on the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, showing scribbled marks left by multiple dust devils. This is described in a page of text on the left-hand side. There is also a sidebar with ancillary information across the main image.
A screenshot of a chapter from my book about the Lagoon Nebula. On the right-hand side, there is a colourful image of the inner region of the nebula, taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, showing clouds of gas and dust swirling around the core of this star-forming region. This is described in a page of text on the left-hand side. There is also a sidebar with ancillary information across the main image.
A screenshot of a chapter from my book about the interacting galaxy system Arp 282. On the right-hand side, there is colour image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, showing a small bluish spiral galaxy interacting with a much larger, redder one. This is described in a page of text on the left-hand side. There is also a sidebar with ancillary information across the main image.
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Mark McCaughrean

A nice cross-over this evening: I gave a talk about the technology & science of JWST to the 25th European Light Microscopy Initiative (ELMI) conference, held at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (@EMBLEvents) in Heidelberg 🔬🔭

Thanks to the very kind audience, to Timo Zimmerman & Aline Schnieder of EMBL for the invitation & organisation, & to the folks from Teledyne who made the JWST near-IR detectors that have taken most of my data 🙇‍♂️

A view looking up into the spiral atrium of EMBL’s main building. It is dusk and the atrium is brightly lit in white, with several glass bridge across and a dark blue sky through the windows above.
A crowd of people in the auditorium at EMBL after my talk. My laptop is on the podium in front, with a monitor facing me with a bunch of images for our Space Rocks Uplink livestream series.
Three men standing in front of a conference stand for Teledyne scientific imaging.
#SpaceScience#Science
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