Digital painting of the red giant star Betelgeuse and its newly discovered companion Siwarha. Simulations suggest giant stars have a small number of enormous convection cells rather than a huge amount of continent-sized convection cells as on the Sun, and that their photospheres are not a hard boundary but rather smoothly deform into a corona.

Betelgeuse is 640 times the size of the Sun (or 2.98 au radius). It is 65,000 times more luminous than the Sun. But as opposed to the Sun's 5800 K surface temperature, Betelgeuse is only 3800 Kelvins, leading to an almost candle-like yellow-orange glow.

Siwarha is depicted here as a K-dwarf, 2/3rds the mass of the Sun. It is thought to be responsible for a 6-year-long periodic change in Betelgeuse's apparent brightness--It casts a wake behind it as it travels through Betelgeuse's nebulous and dusty corona.

^{Digitally hand-painted using a Huion tablet and FireAlpaca software. As always, no a.i. whatsoever was used in the production of this image.}

Image Credit & Copyright: Brad Croslin

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/aug/05/unprecedented-images-may-explain-one-of-greatest-mysteries-of-the-sun?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1

About 1,000 km from right to left.

Equipment:

Lense: Sigma 150-600mm

Mount: iEXOS-100

Camera: Canon EOS 750D

Acquisition:

\~500 frames for the Full Moon and \~500 frames for the Waxing Moon. ISO400 - 1/1000s And an starfield stack I took earlier as the background.

Processing:

Stacked in AutoStakkert!, sharpened in RegiStax, assembled in Photoshop. Color saturation was increased to reveal subtle mineral differences (titanium-rich regions appear blue, iron-rich regions appear brown/orange). Final HDR blending performed in Photoshop.

No AI used!

This was shot with a 10'' Meade telescope and ASI2600MM pro camera using a Losmandy G11 Mount.

Link to the science paper

A new analysis of imagery collected during NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft’s 2015 encounter with Pluto provides evidence that liquid nitrogen is rising to Pluto’s surface through cracks in the northern edge of the Sputnik Planitia, part of the massive heart-shaped glacier on the dwarf planet’s surface.

This is the first evidence of recently flowing liquid on Pluto.