Jason Nishiyama @evilscientistca@octodon.social

Pulsars are the rapidly rotating neutron stars, the remnants of some supernova explosions. A beam of energy is release along the magnetic poles of the pulsar. If that beam points towards Earth, we detect a "click" of radio energy.

Though to the unaided eye the Moon tends to appear as only a few shades of grey, it actually does have more colour as this image shows. The various colours are due to the different mineral content of the surface. #astrophoto

Comets actually have two tails. A dust tail pushed back by the pressure of the Sun's light (white in this image) and an ion tail pushed back by the particles of the solar wind (blue in this image).
(image:M. Fairbanks -CC attrib, share alike license)

Open clusters are incredible natural laboratories. Since the stars that make up the cluster were all born at the same time, in astronomical terms; clusters have shown us how more massive stars age faster than less massive ones. Clusters are great teachers of stellar evolution. #astrophoto

Spiral galaxies appear as two general types. No bar as seen in the image of M101 (left) and with a bar as seen in M109 (right). #astrophoto

2019 second warmest year on record NASA: http://evl.link/ir

The Leo Triplet, made up of NGC 3628 (top), M65 (bottom right) and M66 (bottom left), is a popular target for amateur astronomers as it is easy to locate and made up of relatively bright galaxies. The galaxies are on the order of 30 million light years from Earth. #astrophoto

Though they seem small, sunspots are actually quite large. The white dot in the upper left is the size of the Earth to scale and most of the sunspots in this image from July 2014 are larger.

At 243K the temperature doesn't seem that bad...

The clouds of the planet Venus are so thick that the only maps we have of its surface have been done by either Earth based, or in the case of this map, spacecraft mounted radar. (NASA image)

Welcome to Calgary, where the weather is best described as highly variable...

M27 was the first planetary nebula discovered, on 12 July 1764 by Charles Messier. Messier was unaware of what M27 was beyond a fuzzy object that wasn't a comet, which is how it ended up on his eponymous list. #astrophoto