These are the space-weather conditions right now, the strongest proton storm in over 20 years:
#ESAEuclid
We welcome our follower number 2000 – at the start of the #ESAEuclid Data-Release-1-year 2026!
(Let's see when we'll get the next 26 followers!)
Yannick Mellier, 1958–2025
Yes, we've been anxiously looking at their activtiy since they (re)appeared. Our little space telescope (#ESAEuclid) doesn't like strong eruptions very much.
We followed up #ESAEuclid's near-infrared image of the Dark Cloud LDN 1641 with a comparison to the previous most used survey, 2MASS, and to a bespoke ground-based image in visible light.
Here's the comparison and writeup, including tools to pan, zoom, and experiment yourself:
We summarized #ESAEuclid's experience with this outbreak here:
Not only #ESAEuclid saw the recent massive solar proton and X-ray outbreaks. Some of #ESA's other sats actually did science with it:
https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Space_weather/Lessons_from_the_November_2025_solar_storm
We asked amateur astronomy colleagues to create for us a colour-image in visible light of the same region. They delivered!
Also, we added a comparison to 2MASS, the so-far go-to near-infrared all-sky survey. There are differences...
We also created a viewer tool for the Dark Cloud to see all images: Euclid, visible, and 2MASS – for you to zoom and pan around.
Here's the background and access to all comparison sliders and tools:
https://www.euclid-ec.org/clouds-darkness-dust-and-light/
#ESAEuclid #astronomy #space #Euclid
🧵
Do you remember the 'Dark Cloud' image of LDN 1641 from #ESAEuclid that was released by #ESA two weeks ago? We now added a comparison to a ground-based image in visible light:
This is what #ESAEuclid saw during the recent solar storm that brought so many colourful aurorae to Earth. It brought a lot of things (X-rays, proton) to space, not colourful, but very impactful:
Read more about this:
Those were beautiful #aurorae in the past days. A solar storm brought a lot of protons to Earth. Not only to Earth but also to #ESAEuclid – but does #Euclid notice? Oh yes.
Euclid and the Dark Cloud
I haven’t posted anything recently about the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission, but I can remedy that by passing on a new image with text from the accompanying press release. This is actually just one of a batch of new science results emerging from the first `Quick Release’ (Q1) data; I blogged about the first set of Q1 results here.
Incidentally, I find the picture is very reminiscent of a famous painting by James McNeill Whistler.
Image description: The focus of the image is a portion of LDN 1641, an interstellar nebula in the constellation of Orion. In this view, a deep-black background is sprinkled with a multitude of dots (stars) of different sizes and shades of bright white. Across the sea of stars, a web of fuzzy tendrils and ribbons in varying shades of orange and brown rises from the bottom of the image towards the top-right like thin coils of smoke.
Technical details: The colour image was created from NISP observations in the Y-, J- and H-bands, rendered blue, green and red, respectively. The size of the image is 11 232 x 12 576 pixels. The jagged boundary is due to the gaps in the array of NISP’s sixteen detectors, and the way the observations were taken with small spatial offsets and rotations to create the whole image. This is a common effect in astronomical wide-field images.
Accompanying Press Release
The above view of interstellar gas and dust was captured by the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope. The nebula is part of a so-called dark cloud, named LDN 1641. It sits at about 1300 light-years from Earth, within a sprawling complex of dusty gas clouds where stars are being formed, in the constellation of Orion.
This is because dust grains block visible light from stars behind them very efficiently but are much less effective at dimming near-infrared light.
The nebula is teeming with very young stars. Some of the objects embedded in the dusty surroundings spew out material – a sign of stars being formed. The outflows appear as magenta-coloured spots and coils when zooming into the image.
In the upper left, obstruction by dust diminishes and the view opens toward the more distant Universe with many galaxies lurking beyond the stars of our own galaxy.
Euclid observed this region of the sky in September 2023 to fine-tune its pointing ability. For the guiding tests, the operations team required a field of view where only a few stars would be detectable in visible light; this portion of LDN 1641 proved to be the most suitable area of the sky accessible to Euclid at the time.
The tests were successful and helped ensure that Euclid could point reliably and very precisely in the desired direction. This ability is key to delivering extremely sharp astronomical images of large patches of sky, at a fast pace. The data for this image, which is about 0.64 square degrees in size – or more than three times the area of the full Moon on the sky – were collected in just under five hours of observations.
Euclid is surveying the sky to create the most extensive 3D map of the extragalactic Universe ever made. Its main objective is to enable scientists to pin down the mysterious nature of dark matter and dark energy.
Yet the mission will also deliver a trove of observations of interesting regions in our galaxy, like this one, as well as countless detailed images of other galaxies, offering new avenues of investigation in many different fields of astronomy.
In visible light this region of the sky appears mostly dark, with few stars dotting what seems to be a primarily empty background. But, by imaging the cloud with the infrared eyes of its NISP instrument, Euclid reveals a multitude of stars shining through a tapestry of dust and gas.
The @GermanAstroSoc honoured Dr. Frank Grupp with its Instrument Development Award for his outstanding design and construction of complex optics, in particular for #ESAEuclid. We congratulate Frank - indeed #Euclid's optics and those of its NISP near-infrared instrument are exceptionally good!
Not bad: there will be 2.1 Petabytes of data in the #ESAEuclid data release 1 (DR1). To the @ec_euclid this fall, to the world in fall 2026. ~1900 deg² of the extragalactic sky, several bands, high angular resolution, spectra, images,...
#ESAEuclid launched two years ago. This seems both like yesterday and a long time ago:
https://www.euclid-ec.org/second-anniversary-of-euclid-in-space/
So many things to be excited about with today’s #ESAEuclid data splash, but this👇is the result I’m most in awe of: “mass curves spacetime” in action, revealed in exquisite detail for absolutely oodles of galaxies, all thanks to citizen scientists❤️ 🔭🧪
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:p5h5ai6lj6bc53b7mmvy3rf2/post/3lkpzudjefk2g
🌌 🛰️Un "coffre au trésor" cosmique s'ouvre ! #ESAEuclid dévoile ses premières données scientifiques, capturant 26 millions de galaxies avec précision. Un projet où la France excelle avec le @cnrs comme premier contributeur scientifique.
Nice but is this really so important that one has to pre-announce the announcement?
#Euclid #ESAEuclid #EinsteinRing
https://www.euclid-ec.org/einstein-ring-in-ngc-6505/
And as usual with #ESAEuclid, both the full scene of NGC 6505 and its environment and background are visible in the same image, as well as the Einstein Ring in the center. But you have to zoom in!
Images in our blogpost https://www.euclid-ec.org/einstein-ring-in-ngc-6505/
The combination of #ESAEuclid's spatial resolution and sensitivity of these observations shows the central Einstein Ring in NGC 6505 so clearly that it almost looks painted. But it is being created by gravity.
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