Decided to go with the VLA Antenna as we have Dr Michael Busch — Jansky Postdoctoral Fellow from @thenrao.bsky.social visiting and giving a talk on molecules and gas in the Interstellar Medium today! Also, the gardens here on campus are looking great!

📸 JUST IN: new photographs of the Ariane 6 #VA265 #Copernicus Sentinel-1D launch earlier this week by our ESA and CSG photographers. www.flickr.com/photos/europ...

Image of our interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS from the Chinese TianWen-1 Mars orbiter back in September (plus the usual plethora of cosmic ray hits on raw space images) www.cnsa.gov.cn/n6758823/n67...

Post perihelion optical data on our interstellar visitor, 3I/ATLAS. - the G band optical data seems to be about 1.7 magnitudes high (i.e., fainter) than PUNCH since early September. - my model is about 0.6 magnitudes lower (i.e., brighter) than either PUNCH and LASCO C3

More than half the research space on Starlab commercial space station is already booked, exec says aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/more-than-ha...

Startup "Blue Skies Space" pioneers subscription service for space-based astronomy Startup will sell data from its tiny, low-cost 13 centimeter UV telescope with an annual subscription costing the rough equivalent of a year’s salary for a Ph.D. student. www.science.org/content/arti...

The return of Isaacman spacepolicyonline.com/news/trump-w...

This exchange took place ~6 months ago lmao 🫢

Trump Will Re-Nominate Isaacman for NASA Administrator spacepolicyonline.com/news/trump-w...

Why the U.S. shouldn’t simply race to Lagrange points  From the first satellite in orbit, to the first human in space, to the first steps on the moon, the United States government has always framed space exploration as a race. As U.S.-China space competition intensifies, so too does our American…

October 25, 2021. Launch of Progress MS-18. With one of the local Baikonur foxes in attendance.

Isn't it extraordinary that the Yutu-2 rover is the only moving thing on the Moon's surface? Still going after seven years, on the far side. Would it make a psychological difference if we knew it was trundling along on the side facing us? #PlanetSci

Q&A: The pace is picking up for Astroscale Through missions currently on the books for the Japan Space Agency JAXA, the U.S. Space Force, European Space Agency, UK Space Agency and Eutelsat OneWeb, the Tokyo-based on-orbit servicing company Astroscale aims to demonstrate inspection and proximity…

Launch Readiness Review concludes: we are ready! 🛰️Earth observer Copernicus Sentinel-1D is on its #Ariane6 rocket and set for launch. ☁️ Weather conditions favourable. 🚀 Liftoff at 21:03 GMT/22:03 CET ▶️ Watch live: www.esa.int/Applications...

Nvidia Sends a Powerful GPU to Space spectrum.ieee.org/nvidia-h100-...

🔭 Tonight's Moon is nearly full. It's 97.2% illuminated.

Capitol Hill is abuzz with talk of the “Athena” plan for NASA arstechnica.com/space/2025/1...

A new R band magnitude from today for our interstellar visitor, 3I/ATLAS. Note that we expect these "red" magnitudes to be below the wide band magnitudes including the green gas coma. We can expect 3I to decline in brightness now - the question is, how fast?

Open Sesame! The ELT doors have moved for the first time. This was no small feat, as each door will weigh 650 tonnes once completed. The ELT dome & its doors will guard the telescope from the harsh conditions of the Atacama Desert. https://www.eso.org/public/videos/potw2544a/ 🔭 🧪 📹 ESO/ACe

I'm still trying to identify the reentry seen over Aruba at 0112 UTC Oct 31 - I suspect it was 65564 / 2025-202B CZ-7A Y14 stage 3, which did reenter that day and whose orbit seems to roughly match. Can someone with better reentry prediction tools check me?

Do Aliens Speak Physics? gizmodo.com/aliens-might...

Do Aliens Speak Physics? gizmodo.com/aliens-might...

This remains one of my fav studies - and a true first of its kind! The first off-Earth archaeological fieldwork, with the experiment designed by @drspacejunk.bsky.social and then undertaken / analysed / reported by the International Space Station Archaeological Project. So good!

Trying to get a topographic map of Venus, and... Due to the lapse in appropriations, the service you are trying to access is unavailable until further notice. If you urgently need to speak with someone at the USGS regarding emergencies or matters of protecting life and property, call...

A rough estimate of V=9.7 from a small telescope image (from Arizona) yesterday: scicomm.xyz/@qicheng@com...

Exactly 25 years ago, at 09:21 UTC, the era of continuous human presence on the International @Space_Station began. Since Crew One took up residence in 2000, 21 @esa.int astronauts have lived and worked on this orbital outpost, conducting essential research to benefit life on Earth.

no, its a good question! Short answer: yes, but the GWs from the period of the early Universe (when it was very infant), not the GWs from after that. Sceintists try to find these GW imprints in the cosmic background radiation (see experiments like BICEP, Planck). AFAIK, they're not detected yet.

Often stare at water waves & think of the gravitational-wave spectrum: - ripples as high-freq continuous waves - a boat’s wake as an approaching wave of a transient event - harbour as the incoherent combo of all waves - the tides as the low-freq. GWs "frequency" is timescale between wave crests

JUICE and 3I/ATLAS: An Unexpected Encounter in Space - starting TODAY (Nov 2nd)! Over the next few days and weeks, ESA's spacecraft JUICE will have a good view of the recently discovered interstellar object 3I/ATLAS. www.mps.mpg.de/juice-and-3i...

Here is a good overview of potential JUICE science at 3I/ATLAS: www.mps.mpg.de/juice-and-3i...

JUICE and 3I/ATLAS: An Unexpected Encounter in Space - starting TODAY (Nov 2nd)! Over the next few days and weeks, ESA's spacecraft JUICE will have a good view of the recently discovered interstellar object 3I/ATLAS. www.mps.mpg.de/juice-and-3i...

2nd Nov. 2025 marks the 25th anniversary of the ongoing human presence off-world. That is, humans have continuously occupied the ISS for exactly 25 years today. So if you're <= 24 years old, you've never lived in a world where humans were *only* terrestrial-based. Image by HEO (from above!) 🔭🧪

And then there were two! Another one caught last night as well. Two lunar impact events in a row caught by @dfuji1.bsky.social

Let me say this in plain English: a comet can just be a comet

Emerald Lucille Lovebird 🦜 wishes all peace 🕊️ #TheDailyLovebird

Comet A6 Lemmon's closest approach to the Sun is on November 8th, 2025. I took this image on October 29th showing a huge increase in activity around the core. A very zoomed in shot using a 16 inch telescope f/18, 7400mm focal length with Canon R6. #astrophotography #astronomy #comets #cometlemmon

COSMOS 2506 Hi-res image (from Seesat) app.astrobin.com/i/ttt2cw

This graph never fails to be shocking: "The US has experienced the earliest and greatest slowdown in life expectancy improvements among higher-income countries, reported Eileen Crimmins. “We have horrible life expectancy—and it’s getting worse and worse”" www.prb.org/resources/se...

That’s 19 launches with firm dates scheduled for November, 11 of which are SpaceX alone, including 8 more Starlink batches. That’ll put 2025 over 2024’s record of 254 successful orbital launches in one year, easy. nextspaceflight.com/launches/

Folks — @astrobites.bsky.social is a fantastic community-media source for astronomy news, and gives voice to the fantastic research that goes on by early career scientists. If you wanna get some experience in Astro SciComm writing it’s the place to be. Check link below for deets! 👇🏽

3I/ATLAS has already been recovered at Lowell Observatory today! The picture www.facebook.com/lowellobserv... has a surprisingly high contrast. And the magnitude is about 10.5 mag.: scicomm.xyz/@qicheng@com...

Today isn't just #Halloween🎃, it's also #DarkMatterDay! Dark matter interacts via gravity, so while we can’t see it directly, we know it’s there. NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory's 10-year survey will measure distortions in billions of galaxies, revealing where dark matter is hiding.🔭🧪

Hey, I can talk about EU5 now. It's good! It is very complex, it is complex by the standards of a Paradox game. But it also embraces a historical vision that sees a wider range of actors than just states - both people within states and people outside of them. acoup.blog/2025/10/31/m...

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!

Hotting up nicely!

👻🔭 Happy Halloween! Enjoy this spooky ghost nebula and some spaced out dancers courtesy of NSF NOIRLab and the Mayall Telescope at NSF Kitt Peak National Observatory! Credit: T.A. Rector/University of Alaska Anchorage, H. Schweiker/WIYN and NOIRLab/NSF/AURA

Perhaps one of the more important posts you'll read in a long time if you care about the future of space exploration. My (biased) tl;dr = the history of spaceflight suggests that gutting NASA tech dev (inc its science side!) may actually gut the future of the "commercial" space programs as well

Update on the utterly normal activity of comet 3I/ATLAS: the lack of shenanigans continues - this is just a comet doing its comet thing.

I somehow missed that the interstellar comet, 3I/ATLAS, is around 9th magnitude now. I've seen objects that bright in bionoculars from a dark site! I expect to see a lot of great amateur shots soon.

It is at really low solar elongation right now, only about 15 degrees away. So you would have to go chasing it before Astronomical twilight. This is why these heliospheric imagers (PUNCH etc.) are so damned useful right now!