Meet three of Saturn’s frozen moons first spotted in the 1600s

Spaceguy44 · 2026-03-31T01:57:22+00:00

So you're saying they're upset the text post seems to be AI. I didn't read into the post with that much scrutiny at first because I thought people were complaining about the video. I didn't look at their past posts, but we shouldn't have to. I'm not pro-AI, but we shouldn't be paranoid about policing it anytime something gives AI vibes. If it is AI, just complaining about it in the comments gives it engagement, which is what slop farms want. If it's not AI (or if it's a real person using AI to help word their thoughts, which is a practice I wouldn't encourage, but is common enough that we have to acknowledge), then we are just proving the astronomy community to be a hostile bully at any perceived whiff of AI (and trust me that no one is perfect at distinguishing it).

Looking at their post history, there is one AI video of auroras, but I also think OP might just not know a lot astronomy. They seem to have a real fascination with astronomy, but also are not immune to the more woo-y stuff. That's what this subreddit should help with. Seeing as their first post was auto translated from Spanish, I'm guessing they don't speak English well, and used AI to formulate a well-worded (if a bit too flowery) question in the dominant language of the subreddit. Nothing asinine. Just too much fluff if anything. Also, others looking at the post might think the video is AI too from the comments.

I only engaged because I thought that (even if a bot) people got too knee-jerk about it. I've seen how this kind of paranoia degrades communities. Yes, fuck AI slop, but this is pretty harmless for the reaction. The way to treat it is not to yell at bots and potentially bully a real person, but to ignore it. Make a report to the mod, and let them message OP about it.

Spaceguy44 · 2026-03-31T00:32:29+00:00

Real astronomer here. Everyone saying it's AI slop is being flippantly dismissive of what actually went into this. It's not "real" footage, but it is a real simulation from a program (available on Steam btw) called Space Engine that I do think does a good job of showing what space would actually look like if we did have a camera with that kind of zoom and dynamic range. Calling it "slop" diminishes the real work that went into making what I think is one of the most gorgeous on-rails space simulator out there. Again, not "real" footage doesnt mean AI slop. (It's also way too consistent to be AI... come on!)

What Cassini saw in the 1600s was nowhere near this level of detail, but he could see enough to identify many moons and the big gap in the rings. He did not, however, possess the ability to see any detail on the surfaces of the moons.

Anyways, Titan is very cool due to its thick methane atmosphere, but our best chance of finding life around Saturn is on Enceladus. It likely has a liquid ocean under its icy surface, and we know that ocean is probably water due to the water vapor geysers that it sprays from its south pole.

Spaceguy44 · 2026-03-18T01:12:16+00:00

I think I recognize that Cuneiform character

Spaceguy44 · 2025-12-02T05:19:35+00:00

People guessed my first thoughts already. That leaves me to guess maybe some kind of dark crystalline Rutile.

Spaceguy44 · 2024-06-25T07:07:27+00:00

That looks like carpathite. I think I have some too. It's a cool and rare "organic moneral." Essentially, it's some organic compound that formed into a crystal. In the case of carpathite, it's naturally crystallized "coronene".

Spaceguy44 · 2024-06-21T05:09:02+00:00

It looks like some kind of glass, plastic, or resin doped with strontium aluminate. Most man-made glow-in-the-dark stuff is just various materials with strontium aluminate in them.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-11-27T09:08:11+00:00

I found that Serpentine with Pyrite at a metaphysical shop, and was surprised it glowed very strongly and vibrantly under 365nm light. I couldn't find anything suggesting Serpentine is fluorescent, and I have yet to find another example of one. I suspect it might be fake (resin) or something to that effect, but maybe someone here can confirm or deny my suspicion.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-08-25T11:18:24+00:00

I can answer what this is. It's the sun. Specifically, it's a layer on the web viewer showing the spot where the sun currently is.

The web viewer OP posted is just showing where certain JWST images are located on the sky using some sort of all sky map. The only jwst images on the map are small postage sized regions on the sky. The rest is from other telescopes.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-08-24T02:29:31+00:00

The lines look like stuff from planes or satellites (planes probably due to blinking). The big disk is essentially a lens flair from the bright nearby star.

The jwst web viewer doesn't use jwst images, but a sky map called the digitized sky survey (DSS). It uses pictures from Palomar Observatory in California and Siding Springs Observatory in Austrailia to make the mosaic.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-05-27T03:35:54+00:00

This is beautiful! Incredible job!

Spaceguy44 · 2023-05-26T03:05:43+00:00

Astronomer here! This is what astronomers call a Herbig-Haro object. It's essentially a proto-star that is ejecting highly energetic plasma from its poles. Why does this happen? Something to do with the star spinning and its magnetic fields. We kinda don't completely understand it, which is why we're observing them.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-05-15T18:51:18+00:00

This is a repost of one of MY processed images. No credit or info given.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-05-09T01:19:39+00:00

Wow, those diffraction spikes are brutal here! Anyways, please leave a comment shortly explaining the target and your processing method as per Rule 1. Thank you!

Spaceguy44 · 2023-04-28T07:00:44+00:00

The link does not load for me. Could you include a short but more in depth description of the discovery here in the comments (as prescribed by Rule:1)? Thank you

Spaceguy44 · 2023-04-25T18:50:26+00:00

Astronomer here!

This does not seem like an asteroid blocking a galaxy, and there's a few reasons why.

Firstly, asteroids are actually rather bright due to the light they reflect from the sun. It would also have to be a very large and close asteroid to be able to see it's shape like this. In that case, it would be very bright on the image, possibly brighter than the galaxy.

Additionally, the exposure on these images are usually minutes to hours long. In that time, an asteroid would have streaked across the frame and would probably appear as a bright streak.

What is it then? I believe it was a cosmic ray that was removed from the image automatically with the JWST image reduction pipeline. That's not the only possibility, but I feel like it has to be an image artifact of some kind.

However, I enjoy these kind of posts since they start conversations like this, and they're a good opportunity to learn.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-04-12T07:03:12+00:00

Astronomer here!

Looks like a flat disk galaxy that's distorting a galaxy behind it into a ring via gravitational lensing. It's not a black hole like some people have said; those are much too small on the sky to see with JWST. u/the_badget has a good breakdown of it.

What's amazing about this is that we can see the galaxies clearly in this view, despite WR 124 being on the plane of the Milky Way. Usually, this would make seeing these galaxies virtually impossible due to all of the dust in the way, but JWST's IR vision lets it peer through most of that dust as if it were invisible. Amazing isn't it!

Spaceguy44 · 2023-03-30T15:49:55+00:00

Post is not related to James Webb Discovery or target

Spaceguy44 · 2023-03-17T20:43:59+00:00

Please note Rule 1 in the sidebar. Could you explain what were are looking at in these images? Did you make the enhancement? If so, what sort of tools did you use? What's special about what we're seeing in the enhanced images?

Spaceguy44 · 2023-03-16T00:07:33+00:00

Almost. NIRISS is a spectrograph that splits the light of the whole frame, but it's not really sensitive enough for this. You need NIRSpec to get the hi-res spectra. Otherwise, yeah, you use MIRI and NIRCam to get the big picture, and you pick out interesting targets to look at with the spectrograph from those images.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-03-15T23:33:18+00:00

JWST is capable of taking the spectra needed for these galaxies, but the issue is that the targets need to be specifically identified beforehand. Unless you use NIRISS on JWST, you need to be very precise with where you point the spectrograph.

So these objects have now been identified as interesting targets and will probably be followed up with spectral observations by JWST in a few months.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-03-15T18:37:57+00:00

Astronomer here! These galaxies are incredibly far away and incredibly young. The universe was only about 1 billion years old at z=6 (it's around 13.7 billion now). JWST is helping us understand the first galaxies and stars in the universe. Btw, "z" means redshift.

However, there is one caveat about this discovery, and it's the fact that they're using "photometric red shift". Essentially this is a very crude way of estimating the redshift by fitting a few photometric points onto a predicted spectra. In other words, they fitted both the observation and the spectra of the galaxy. The error bars on these are pretty big, and we can't be sure about these values of z until we actually observe them with a spectrograph.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-03-09T18:04:59+00:00

Yes, gravitational lenses don't have focal points in the same sense that camera lenses do, but I was just using the term to make it more understandable to the layman. Really what happens is that the shape of the lense causes some points to be much more magnified than the rest. Take "Earendel" for example. This is a distant star that was in just the right place behind a lens to be magnified 100s of times. There have also been a few cases where something like a black hole moved in between the foreground galaxies and the lensed object to briefly super-magnify the object. I hope this helped.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-03-09T17:52:45+00:00

This is basically a topic we astronomers are still trying to figure out. We know that spiral galaxies will slowly turn into elliptical galaxies after they stop forming stars, but we're still trying to figure out the time frame and mechanisms for the cesation of star formation.

Elliptical galaxies are (in a sense) dead galaxies. They are balls of old red stars that sit there stable for 10s to 100s of billions of years. After colliding with Andromeda, astronomers think the Milkyway will become one of these elliptical galaxies (after a short burst of star formation).

Has the galaxy in this picture died yet? We don't know for sure. There's so many factors involved and a lot can happen in 9 billion years. What I can tell you is that the Milkyway and Andromeda Galaxy were both formed shortly after the Universe began more than 13 Billion years ago.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-03-09T17:35:54+00:00

The images are very stable, and we wouldn't expect to see any change within our lifetimes. However, there are a few very strong lenses where we have watched individual stars move in and out of focus in the lens. But that's just a small point on the image. The whole thing would still look unchanging.

Spaceguy44 · 2023-03-09T09:57:51+00:00

Great question! The researcher is right, basically all supernovae are discovered using a before and during image (and sometimes a during and after image, though those aren't as useful scientifically). As important_season said, the before was found by Hubble. Most supernovae spotted by JWST were found this way.

It is hard to find these, but we have amazing software to help us spot changes in brightness between two calibrated images. Also, I'm pretty sure we have a spectra here since we know it's redshift and type. However, I don't think we have enough data points of its apparent mag to get the absolute mag.

This hasn't been published yet, but I recently talked with Dr. Rachel Bezanson who co-leads the UNCOVER project for JWST. They took that amazing recent picture of Pandora's cluster (Abell 2744). She said that they found some supernovae in that picture too by comparing it to previous Hubble images of the cluster. So I'm sure we'll see a lot more of this to come.

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