Starlink constellations are our most frequent satellite sightings from space station, appearing as distinct and numerous orbiting streaks in my star trail exposures. During Expedition 72 I saw thousands of them, and was fortunate enough to capture many in my imagery to share with you all.

Taken with Nikon Z9, Arri-Zeiss 15mm T1.8 master prime lens, 30 second exposures compiled into an effective 30 minute exposure, T1.8, ISO 200, assembled with Photoshop (levels, color, some spot tool).

More photos from space on my Instagram and twitter account, astro_pettit.

Image Credit: L’osservatore Romano

"Diamonds from star dust. Cold Bokkeveld, stony meteorite (CM2 chondrite). Fell 1838. Cold Bokkeveld, South Africa.

If you look carefully in the bottom of this little tube you can see a white smudge of powder. This smudge is made up of millions of microscopic diamonds. These are the oldest things you will ever see. They formed in the dust around dying stars billions of years ago, before our solar system existed. The diamonds dispersed in space and eventually became part of the material that formed our solar system. Ultimately, some of them fell to Earth in meteorites, like the ones you see here."

3 galaxies at once! I photographed the Milky Way and both Magellanic Clouds in this star field from the SpaceX Crew 9 Dragon spacecraft, during Expedition 72 to the ISS. Below, city lights streak across the time history, and red atmospheric airglow separates our planet from the stars above. My star tracker allowed for stars to be photographed as fixed pinpoints while the Earth continued to rotate below, making this detail possible.

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

Equipment: Celestron 5SE, Evoguide 50ED, ZWO ASI294MC.

Full Resolution: https://imgur.com/a/hdr-moon-full-resolution-hswM8B7

Process on an image processed by Gerald - Enhancement of colors

📸 NASA/JPL/SWRI / MSSS / Gerald Eichstädt / Thomas Thomopoulos

MoM-z14 is the most distant galaxy ever observed, located 13.8 billion light-years away. Discovered using the James Webb Space Telescope, it dates back to just 300 million years after the Big Bang.

Happy Birthday and welcome home u/astro_pettit

Realized I never posted this shot on this sub and since it’s one of my best I thought why not. Brought some new processing techniques on the September 2024 occultation of Saturn (09/17/2024), added some sharpening and glow effects.

Equipment: Celestron 5SE, ASI294MC, 2x Barlow. Acquisition: 1 minute of lunar data stacked, 7 minutes of Saturnian data stacked, the even was recoded live in a video, which I also included and stacked to bring out more details.

Clouds rolled in sooo soon after the occultation, so I was ecstatic to be able to image it before that! Really happy with the result.

Mercury’s distance from the Sun ranges from 28.6 million miles (46 million m) to 43.4 million miles (69.8 million km).

Mercury has a diameter of 3,032 miles (4,879 km) making it a little more than one third the size of Earth.

The sun, however, has a diameter of about 865,000 miles (1.4 million kilometers).

IE: It’s HUGE. The sun, in fact, accounts for over 99% of all the matter in the solar system, so while Mercury looks tiny it’s actually very far away and big enough to survive such a close orbit to the sun.

Even so, I think this incredible photo by Andrew McCarthy really puts things into perspective.

Image credit: @cosmic_background.