Moonlight reflected off the Amazon river. At the proper angles in our orbit, we aboard ISS can see brief silvery flashes atop water surfaces, illuminating even the darkest places on Earth. I took this photo with Nikon Z9 camera on Expedition 72, during a nighttime pass over South America. More photos like this from space can be seen on my twitter and Instagram, astro_pettit, for those interested

Hey all, I've been looking at some photos that NASA has been releasing (like ones from Discover) and noticing a lot of the cameras on probes/sats they use a triple overlay to creature fully colored (to us) images.

Why is using three separate pictures so common? Is it because it's easier/takes less time to get one wavelength of light at a time?

See the videos here. I apologies for using Imgur, sincerely.

This rocket is a Falcon-9 carrying the Cargo Dragon spacecraft C211 (its fourth flight). It's carrying more than 6,300 pounds of science equipment and supplies to the International Space Station, and should arrive there Thursday after a roughly 52-hour flight.

In a study published July 16 in the journal Science, a team led by Collin Cherubim, a NASA researcher with a doctorate in planetary science from Harvard University, reported the first atmosphere ever found around a rocky planet in a star's habitable zone.

"We tend to think for a planet to be habitable, it has to be mostly rocky, has to have an atmosphere to shield the surface from harmful radiation, but also to keep water present," Cherubim said in a podcast interview with Science.

"And now we know LHS 1140 b meets those criteria."

LHS 1140 b is one of two planets found around LHS 1140, a star about 50 light-years away. (Astronomers label planets with letters, starting at "b," in the order they're found.)

The star is about one-fifth the size of the sun and less than 1% as bright, so its habitable zone sits close in. LHS 1140 b circles it roughly every 25 days.

Most exoplanets, including LHS 1140 b, are found by watching a star dim slightly as a planet passes in front of it. Those passes, called transits, also let astronomers study a planet's air.

During a transit, some of the star's light passes through the planet's atmosphere. By splitting that light into its component parts with a tool known as a spectrograph, scientists can see which colors went missing and work out which gases absorbed them.

Using a powerful spectrograph on a telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, Cherubim's team found helium around LHS 1140 b, indicating the planet has an atmosphere.

After a long time at the top of my list I finally visited beautiful Oman! I am working on a project where I travel to and document the darkest skies in the world. I set an alarm for 3 AM at our desert camp and hiked out to this spot in pitch darkness. It took me a while to find a photogenic dune like this but I'm THRILLED with the textures on this one. exacctttly the shot I wanted!

With my color correction I went for an "Aladdin" vibe and I think it really hits the spot artistically. I hope you enjoy!