Pic of the Week: Moonrise Perfection over the Dolomites

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Image (Credit): “Moonrise Perfection over the Dolomites” by Fabian Dalpiaz. (Royal Observatory Greenwich)

This week’s image is one of the winning photographs in the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 contest. The photograph, ranked as highly commended under Skyscapes, was submitted by Fabian Dalpiaz and is titled “Moonrise Perfection over the Dolomites.” It was taken on November 15, 2024 in Santuario di Pietralba, Deutschnofen, South Tyrol, Italy.

Here is the notation attached to the photo:

This is a perfectly planned shot of the Full Moon rising above the rugged peaks of the Dolomites. With no clouds in sight and in flawless conditions, the golden light of sunset bathes the mountains, creating harmony between Earth and sky. All it takes is being in the right place at the right time and pressing the shutter button.

Pic of the Week: Capture the Dark 2025 Photo Contest

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Image (Credit): “Land of Ice” by Kavan Chay. (darksky.org/)

This week’s image is from the Capture the Dark 2025 contest sponsored by Dark Sky International. The third place winning photo is “Land of Ice” by Kavan Chay. The photo was taken in Te Papa-Kura-o-Taranaki, New Zealand.

The 2025 contest had over 2,200 entries from over 22 countries. You can see the other winning images here.

Stay tuned for the 2026 contest, which has yet to be announced.

Pic of the Week: Virgo Galaxy Cluster

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Image (Credit): The Virgo galaxy cluster as captured by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. (NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory)

This week’s image comes from the Planetary Society’s recent competition to find the best space exploration images. It shows the Virgo galaxy cluster, which was the winning entry. The image was released on June 23, 2025 by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory located in Chile.

The Virgo galaxy cluster is comprised of anywhere between 1,300 and 2,000 galaxies. What you can see in this image is an impressive array of galaxies, some of them intertwined. How many different worlds within this cluster may be peering back at us? Of course, the Virgo galaxy cluster is 65 million light-years away, so the image of the Milky Way appearing on their telescopes right now was from the time when dinosaurs still walked on the Earth.

Pic of the Week: New Crew Added to ISS on Thanksgiving Day

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Image (Credit): The Expedition 74 crew members launched towards the space station earlier today aboard a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. (NASA/Bill Ingots)

This week’s image shows a Soyuz rocket sending a crew to the International Space Station (ISS) on Thanksgiving Day. One NASA astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts are thankful today that they are safe and sound on the ISS. NASA astronaut Chris Williams joined Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev aboard a Soyuz rocket launched from Russia earlier today.

The three crew members of Expedition 74 join the Expedition 73 crew members already on the station, increasing the crew count to 10 members for the next few weeks. Expedition 74 is scheduled to begin on Monday, December 8th, once three members depart the ISS.

These crews change like clockwork, regardless of holidays, government shutdowns, or even hot wars back on the surface. This dedication to duty is something we can all be thankful for.

Pic of the Week: Wolf-Rayet Apep

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Image (Credit): Dust spirals surrounding Wolf-Rayet Apep, as captured by the JWST. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Y. Han (Caltech), R. White (Macquarie University), A. Pagan (STScI))

This week’s embryonic image comes from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It shows what NASA calls “four serpentine spirals of dust” around a pair of Wolf-Rayet stars. Such stars are rare, with NASA estimating that only a thousand can be found in our galaxy consisting of hundreds of billions of stars. And binary Wolf-Rayet stars are even rarer.

NASA notes that the JWST, or Webb, provided a much better image of the spiraling dust:

Observations taken prior to Webb only detected one shell, and while the existence of outer shells was hypothesized, searches using ground-based telescopes were unable to uncover any. These shells were emitted over the last 700 years by two aging Wolf-Rayet stars in a system known as Apep, a nod to the Egyptian god of chaos...Webb also confirmed that there are three stars gravitationally bound to one another in this system. The dust ejected by the two Wolf-Rayet stars is “slashed” by a third star, a massive supergiant, which carves holes into each expanding cloud of dust from its wider orbit. (All three stars are shown as a single bright point of light in Webb’s image.)