If you ever want to read a paper for free and can't find it otherwise, email the lead author and politely ask for a copy. You will not be bothering the person. You will in fact make their whole entire day. I have had scientists get so excited I asked they sent me everything they ever published.

Wowowow - our @science.esa.int Hubble's picture of the month for March is the Cat's Eye Nebula, from combined images of #Hubble and #Euclid. Euclid's wide field and low surface brightness sensitivity brings out an external shell. Incredible image. esahubble.org/images/potm2... 🔭

🌕➡️🔴 Lunar eclipse alert! Depending on where you are (mostly: Central/Eastern Asia, Oceania, most of North/Central America), you may be able to see a TOTAL LUNAR ECLIPSE ("blood moon") overnight! You can find information about timing and viewing locations here: www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/luna...

Join us next Thursday, March 12th, at Guilford Hall Brewery for an exciting evening of space knowledge! Doors open at 7:00 pm, talks start at 7:30 pm. The event is FREE and open to the public!

Follow-up comment on how bad it is on the ground at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. 🔭

Webb Mission Operations Center: 😏

One of the last things I worked on at STScI is finally out. Learn what JWST has taught us about how stars form, and get excited about what we will learn in the future. We're just getting started! Narrated by yours truly. 🔭🧪

Good piece from @astrolaura.com about grifting that is "buying" stars or star names. Don't do it. Go chat with your friendly astronomer pals - they have many names for the stars they study, and if you ask about a certain star they study, maybe you can come up with a name they'll use! Save $40!

"Every person is a human being, whose personal development is more important than our short-term scientific accomplishments" - and more bangers in this from David Hogg (spoiler: it's about AI!) arxiv.org/abs/2602.10181 🔭

While not a real-time image feed from the telescopes (the images are from existing surveys), you can see what Hubble or Webb are observing right now. Pretty neat! 🔭🧪

#NASAWebb has set a new cosmic distance record: MoM-z14, the furthest galaxy ever confirmed (for now). In this image we see the galaxy as it appeared only 280 million years after the universe began in the big bang: https://news.stsci.edu/49Uanyg

My latest video for @aot-baltimore.bsky.social: Heated Rivalry Astronomy on Tap In a world where there are no out gay observatories, NASA Astrophysics and NASA Earth Science begin a romance. Can they keep their love a secret? www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLa8...

Some info on how #Artemis II might impact #JWST operations, from our @jwstobserver.bsky.social site. 🔭https://www.stsci.edu/contents/news/jwst/2026/artemis-ii's-possible-impact-on-jwst-science-operations.html

Working in astronomy outreach, you quickly learn that the average person knows way less than you think. It's fine! You can live your whole life without knowing if the Sun is a star. I know because it is my job, most people don't have to. But asking questions is the first step to learning more.

Few individuals have had such a colossal & deleterious impact on the cultural psyche as the recently-departed Erich von Däniken. While he was not alone in fusing aliens into our conception of the distant human past, he was perhaps the most successful & the most harmful in doing so.

I am once AGAIN asking that everyone use ALT text in their images. I see a lot of good stuff I'd like to repost but I won't if it's not accessible. So please take a moment and do so when you put up a pic. Thank you.

Sometimes you stumble over to a packed breakout session at your big annual academic conference and learn that some billionaires have decided to build not one, but FOUR, complementary new telescope facilities, and build them fast Well OK then! Happy new year! From their pockets to our skies! 🔭

Life update: December 31 was my last day at the Space Telescope Science Institute. The NASA's Universe of Learning grant that paid a large fraction of my salary was not renewed due to NASA budget cuts, so my contract was not renewed.

Hubble image of Arp 297, also known as NGC 5754 and NGC 5752. The pair's interactions created kinked arms in NGC 5754 (the large spiral galaxy) and the blue star clusters in the core of NGC 5752 (the smaller galaxy). Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage team, W. Keel Source

🤔 I think the dictionary is telling me I should get back into making sourdough.

Happy new year! My all sky camera imaged the sky every 15 seconds and this picture shows what happened in the sky in 2025. It shows the length of the night and day with the hourglass shape, the monthly lunar cycle with the diagonal bands, the elevation of the Sun at local noon, and lots of clouds.

And now the MIRI version! 🔭 The observation was made during the night, and just like with NIRCam, the fragments and the tail are beautiful! HD: flic.kr/p/2rPp5EV

I think people today don't understand just how dramatically the night sky has changed - it looked like it does in super remote areas *everywhere* before the invention of electric lighting, and light pollution that obscures the sky has gotten dramatically worse in the last 25 years.

Happy launch anniversary JWST! The telescope launched on December 25, 2021 on an Ariane 5 rocket from the European Spaceport near Kourou, French Guiana. Thanks to the hard work of the people at ESA, JWST had a fantastic start to its trip out to its parking spot 1.5 million km away at L2.

Hubble has imaged the largest planet-forming disk ever seen! At 400 billion miles wide, it is roughly 40 times the diameter of our solar system. The disk is unexpectedly chaotic and turbulent, offering new insights into how planetary systems form: https://bit.ly/477sQ9b 🔭 🧪

Happy Winter Solstice! Beer can, pinhole camera photos of the Summer to Winter Solstice (2024) and the Winter to Summer Solstice (2025). You never know quite what you're going to get with these photos, set the beer can pointing towards the sun at hopefully the correct angle and wait 6 months!

Happy Solstice everyone!

Happy December Solstice! 🌞 It’s summer at NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory in Chile! Wildflowers? Blooming. Skies? Clear. Sun? Vibing. ☀️ Sending warm thoughts to the northern hemisphere! ❄️

The first data from NASA's SPHEREx mission are out! Check out this video, showing the entire sky in infrared light. The Milky Way runs as a band across the center. Each frame shows a different infrared wavelength, with light from stars, hot gas, and cosmic dust. 🔭🧪 www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-s...

I mean, just check out this stunning new image from SPHEREx, the latest NASA space mission. It's mapping the full sky in 102 colors, and choosing the right combinations can reveal different information about the Universe. Here's our galaxy in infrared colors that pick out stars:

I wanted to do a quick thread about this paper led by a great postdoc here at JPL, Flavio Petricca, which suggests that Titan may not have a global ocean after all. www.nasa.gov/solar-system...

I had a blast walking with the @stsci.edu float for the Mayor’s Christmas Parade in Baltimore on Sunday.

Vibert Douglas fought against gender discrimination in her field, earned an MBE for her war service, was a celebrated astrophysicist and one of the first individuals to receive the Order of Canada. This is her remarkable story. 🧵 1/8

One of my favorite recent JWST images, Pismis 24, is now available as a free downloadable poster. Perfect for printing and decorating your walls. It includes the image on the front and a description in both English and Spanish on the back. 🔭🧪 science.nasa.gov/asset/webb/p...

SAVE THE DATE: Dr. Stefanie Milam will discuss how #NASAWebb is revealing details across the Solar System that were not previously known—December 17 at 4 p.m. ET.

🔭 Now it's official, the nebula was never in Andromeda! Our paper has been published and we show that the large 🧪 oxygen nebula is in the Milky Way. This arc was discovered by amateurs photographing Andromeda with an [O III] filter, and now we have new things to say... ⚛️

Space telescopes are way more expensive than ground-based telescopes, for reasons including: • Launch costs • No atmosphere means more radiation and more expensive electronics • Can't fix them if they break, so they need way more testing and better hardware • Cooling in space is very hard, actually

Hubble reobserved interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS on November 30. At the time, the comet was about 178 million miles (286 million kilometers) from Earth. Hubble tracked the comet as it moved across the sky. As a result, background stars appear as streaks of light: https://go.nasa.gov/4iCU2lH 🔭 🧪

I have eaten the planets that were in the inner solar system and which you were probably saving for living on Forgive me they were delicious so crunchy and so warm

Beautiful! On Mars, dust grains are ~ the same size as visible light wavelengths, so they scatter red light away (Mie scattering) and let blue through near the Sun. On Earth, air molecules are far smaller, scatter blue away (Rayleigh) and leave red. Same physics, inverted colors! 🔭 🧪 #science

Very excited to share the NASA/ESA/STScI press release of our team's work on Apep! It's a terrific writeup, complete with a brand new beautiful visualisation of the nebula geometry. 1/? ⚛️🔭🧪 science.nasa.gov/missions/web...

Here are the #I/ATLAS releases from varied NASA/ESA missions. Having worked with such telescope & spacecraft data for 40 years, my perspective is: no surprises. It's a comet; its differences from Solar System comets are intriguing but every comet is different! science.nasa.gov/solar-system...

Just want to emphasize here that this is an image of an INTERSTELLAR COMET taken by a camera orbiting MARS. Space is so cool!

I'm glad this is finally out after the government shutdown! JWST's images of dusty, spiraling shells around Wolf-Rayet star binaries are my favorite.

NASA will host a live event at 3 p.m. EST, Wednesday, Nov. 19, to share imagery of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS collected by a number of the agency’s missions. The event will take place at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. www.nasa.gov/news-release... ☄️🔭

Well, here's some very exciting news! I've been wanting to share this for a few months, but had to wait for the pre-print to drop. A NEW GLITCH ON A MILLISECOND PULSAR HAS BEEN OBSERVED! These events are extremely rare - only two others since MSPs discovered. 🔭🧪📡

My entire timeline rn.

Submit them to Aurorasaurus!!! They're an NSF funded project out of University of New Mexico that takes crowdsourced aurora observations for research purposes: www.aurorasaurus.org

Auroras from north of Baltimore, MD. Taken with a long exposure on my phone. They are just barely visible to the naked eye. 🔭🧪

3I/ATLAS is behaving just as a comet should. No shenanigans. Looking forward to the possibility of JUICE (a European spacecraft heading eventually to Jupiter) observing this object in the coming weeks!