On August 13th, 2025, the clear skies offered me another successful photography of the International Space Station transit in front of the Sun. Taken from Habřinka (by Lázně Bohdaneč), Czech Republic, as a sequence on a 10-inch Dobsonian Telescope, when ISS was about 507,96 km far from me and the whole transit took only 0.65…
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On 12 August 2025, the early morning’s beautiful conjunction of Venus and Jupiter over Seč Lake, Czech Republic, appeared just before the dawn in the bright moonlight. I caught this romantic scene around 3 am CEST while both planets nicely reflected their lights on the water like nothing else so bright in the sky just…
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Yesterday, on 9 August 2025, the “Sturgeon” Full Moon occurred. Here comes a series of the Moon rising over the famous Czech Kunetice Mountain Castle (from the 15th century) as it was seen from a precisely calculated place near Rohoznice village. In this multiexposure, I tried to capture the change of color of the rising…
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This morning, on 5 August 2025, about 0:45 UTC, I was lucky to capture a nice view of the (still faint) comet C/2025 K1 ATLAS against the Milky Way in wide view with Collinder 399 (a.k.a. Brocchi’s Cluster or ‘Coat Hanger’). What a nice photo-opp! The comet itself moves very quickly in the sky as…
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If Scottish physicist Charles Wilson (1869–1959) had known what he would cause with his discovery of an unconfirmed phenomenon that he himself allegedly saw (in 1924), but was first recorded by physicists in 1989, he would probably have whistled with joy. Upper-atmospheric lightning, a still unexplored celestial phenomenon, is a welcome sight for all “hardcore”…
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Every year in mid-August, almost at the same time like the Perseids, another meteor shower peaks: the κ-Cygnid. Named after the star Kappa (κ) in the Swan constellation, from where the slow meteors seemingly appear, they are almost not known as–unlike the Perseids–they have a very low rate of meteors, only about 3 per hour…
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La Mano del Desierto, Hand of the Desert, Desert Hand. A unique 11-meter reinforced concrete sculpture located about 62 km south of the Chilean city of Antofagasta, was built in 1992 by the now 85-year-old sculptor Mario Irarrázabal Covarrubias and attracts hundreds to thousands of tourists from all over the world every day. It is…
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