Where does one even start with this?

Pretty thin night on arXiv just now, or at least the astro-ph part:

What did the early Universe *sound* like. With nice work by Stephane Pigeon who runs mynoise.net, we now have this nice "sonification" of the acoustic noise at the time of recombination. Have a listen! (and use headphone with the "wide" stereo setting. mynoise.net/NoiseMachine...

I saw this referred to as the Strait of Warm Ooze. Very good.

And with the start of summer, one of my favorite versions of my favorite song: www.youtube.com/watch?v=C08W...

My grandfather was a baker. Late in life he went to college. These are from his astronomy class notes, 1962.

Born 100 years ago, today:

Just sayin'

After spending $14 million in taxpayer funds, Trump's renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool are peeling off and floating to the surface

Stanley Kubrick was well ahead of all of us:

Just a little autocorrect mayhem to enliven the day. Trying to text a collaborator about large galaxies without central cores as "coreless," but it was sent as "careless," so I sent an addendum to correct that, which was sent as "cordless." So what would careless or cordless galaxies be exactly?

Would be nice if we had a vaccine to prevent this.

This is important.

A decade ago, I put together a collection of HST images with trails that I discovered while working on the M31 PHAT survey. They were all over the place even back then. It's a fantasy that going to space solves the problem, unless we now go all the way to L2.

Well, this keeps getting nastier by the day...

Would you trust your nice spacecraft to this gang? A cartoon my daughter Sandra Muller made in 2018 of the New Horizons hazard team in advance of the Arrokoth encounter. We had to look ahead to make sure it had no debris around it that we might smack into at 14 km/s.

I miss Santa Cruz. Can't believe that I was there for four years sometimes.

Exploring Petabytes of the Night Sky in Jupyter 🌌 In this Jupyter blog guest post, Robert Nikutta and Stéphanie Juneau from NSF NOIRLab, show how Jupyter enables thousands of astronomers to effectively work with large-scale data on the NOIRLab’s Astro Data Lab Science Platform. bit.ly/3QprZfq

Came across this gem in folder of random stuff I saved on my laptop.

Scanned a picture I took of Halley on 3/21/86 from Kona, HA with my 35mm camera. The "teapot" is at center, with Baade's window steaming out the spout. Pluto was in the "teaspoon" for the NH encounter. SGR A* is near the right edge. I was on both the New Horizons and Event Horizon telescope teams.

🔭 A cautionary tale for undergrads (and above!) using AI for #astro plots: our BSc student wanted to make a "quick" HR diagram showcasing M-dwarfs & thought some chatbot could make one and... well... ...extra credits are now offered to students who can correctly find all errors on cursedHR.png 🫠 🧪

‪ My collection of books on "2001." What I get from the movie in 2026 is strongly different than what I came away with in 1971, when I first saw it at age 14. But it always remains a wonderful inspiration for the imagination, a jazz melody that sparks endless improvisation.

I so want to see this mission go. I mean JFC the damn thing is going to fly around from place to place on, like, Titan. What can possibly top that?

Experts found that the White House budget request for the upcoming fiscal year could defund 54 NASA science missions, including a spacecraft currently studying Jupiter and two planned Venus missions: www.scientificamerican.com/article/whit...

Dear G!  How are you?  Nice story about J. E. in New York mag, you look great on the picture. I know you are very busy flying all over the world. How was Palm Beach? I cannot wait to go down. Give me a call when you are back in NY. Have a great time! Love, Melania

Satire from 2016 - yes this is real... www.npr.org/sections/the...

A little discarded snakeskin that I found by our pool today. The head and tail portions are missing, and hey the snake outgrew it, so where ever he or she is, I know they're considerably bigger than this.

Monday of course is Moon Day

Can anyone explain this abstract, which is first in line on the arXiv tonight: arxiv.org/abs/2604.02366

Some thoughts on the eve of the Artemis return to the Moon: medium.com/@tod.lauer/d...

Late night image processing tricks. Look for dust in an HST WFPC2 image of elliptical galaxy NGC 5846 by subtracting off a model of the galaxy. It's not GALFIT, but you do what you can.

Every now and then, I advertise my compilation of astronomical eponyms for you enjoyment. New additions are always welcome, but please read the rules on the page first. staff.noirlab.edu/tod.lauer/ep...

Tracy Kidder, the author of "The Soul of a New Machine." has passed away. I remember the book vividly, which I read in grad school. It was 1981 and Lick observatory was eagerly awaiting the arrival of its VAX 11/780, a revolutionary machine at the time. 1/n. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/b...

A little poking around ADS turned up this paper from 1975:

So it starts... (The woman is a US citizen(

This is for you @lukemeister.bsky.social

Weaknesses: Didn't say to open the shutter. Why 9 objects instead of 7? No broad interest in Ho. Why couldn't this be done with HWO? Didn't demonstrate having a paper ready to go. Only explained sample selection once instead of 5x and in bold. Everyone knows that the target is not a real galaxy.

Happy Blacker Friday! So how does a Cyc 4 proposal that got 1st quintile, but no data, get triaged out in Cyc 5 and chucked out in the 5th quintile?

The Catalinas as seen at various times from my home in Tucson.

I was in a 2 hour briefing today on the Iran War. All the briefings are closed, because Trump can't defend this war in public. I obviously can't disclose classified info, but you deserve to know how incoherent and incomplete these war plans are. 1/ Here's what I can share:

This will be an instant classic. I'm wondering what paper I can throw together as an excuse to cite it. Although the Arp Atlas was published in the ApJ Supplement in the 60s, you really had to get the book atlas itself, comprising bound photographic prints. 1/n iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...

Electric Vehicles xkcd.com/3214/

This remains one of my all time favorite Onion articles. theonion.com/nasa-announc...

Post a pic you took, no context, to bring some zen to the feed

Post a pic you took, no context, to bring some zen to the feed

Post a pic you took, no context, to bring some zen to the feed

Does anyone know of real scientists commandeering aircraft? In 2001, Heywood Floyd snags two spaceliners to get to Clavius Base (no Zoom for him), and in The Andromeda Strain, Wildfire director Jeremy Stone snags an airliner to get to the lab. Other examples? Did either get peanuts and a drink?