Suddenly feeling very lucky that I plan to drive this holiday season and uncharacteristically have no flights planned until January.

Obviously I use my undergraduate STEM classes in my job all them time. But the course I use the *most* in my job was a writing class, and the ones that I think distinguish me as a scientist and enrich my enjoyment of life are all humanities and social sciences.

Hey, astronomers. Can you imagine astronomy research without ADS?!?!? No? So, have you filled out the ADS survey yet? Help archives help you! (Help archives keep funding!) docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Hey Planetary Science BlueSky. Loeb is making a claim that the outgassing that has produced the (statistically marginal) NGAs measured for 3I/ATLAS to date will necessarily need to be detected as a large coma/tail soon, or else the comet explanation will be disproven. 1/2 🔭🧪

If comets are like cats, and planetary scientists have been studying domestic cats, tigers, leopards, jaguars, etc., of our solar system for many years, then comet 3I/ATLAS barges in like a serval or ocelot on an unbound e=6 orbit from somewhere else 😂. But it still purrs and scratches #3IATLAS

My BlueSky feed is filled with hot takes on the up-to-the-minute results of tonight’s elections and people sharing their wins, while my X feed is full of furious arguments about superhero movies, promoted posts, clickbait, and ragebait.

Hey 🔭 friends: teaching a graduate level time domain course, I've shown a bunch of classic light curve from MACHO... but I haven't been able to find a good source for the MACHO data! There should be light curves for +70 million stars over 8yrs. Anyone have a lead on where the data is these days?

I wrote a textbook! I hope you like it. store.ioppublishing.org/page/detail/...

I did a fun podcast! Sorry to be a party pooper, but humanity will not build a Dyson Sphere around the Sun in our lifetimes. sites.psu.edu/astrowright/...

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

I recommend this article by @meghanbartels.bsky.social and @leebillings.bsky.social for folks who are looking for *factual* information about why 3I/ATLAS is of interest to planetary astronomers: www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...

Have spent a substantial portion of the day turning down requests to comment to the media on Loeb's claims that 3I/ATLAS might be artificial. What was a really interesting science story has been ruined by one man ignorantly shouting. So frustrating.

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!

I have just received from Kevin Walsh of SWRI a re-analysis of the PUNCH data for 3I/ATLAS, & have redone our gas and dust coma prediction models as a result. These new data agree well with the independent reductions of Thomas Lehmann and bode well for the Juice observations starting November 2nd.

uv makes installing and using Python *so* easy! It works on pretty much any computer and it's lightning fast. 🔭☄️ #astrocode If you're still using conda, pyenv, or... basically any other tool, then I can *highly* recommend switching:

A reminder that comets are not carbon copies of each other and typically show a *lot* of variation, even when they're not from another star system.

The traditional comparison for comets is to cats: "Comets are like cats. They have tails and do exactly as they please." Which led Karen Meech to name the Manx comets, which have very faint or short tails, after the Manx cats.

Just to get ahead of Him: 3I/ATLAS is brightening at an unusually high rate through perhelion. This could be because its approach towards the Sun is happening much faster than typical for a comet (because it's interstellar) and this makes the rate that things like H2O sublimate higher than normal.

Rapid Brightening of 3I/ATLAS Ahead of Perihelion arxiv.org/pdf/2510.250...

Perihelion time for interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. Plenty of off-Earth spacecraft continuing observation, but another ~two weeks before ground-based observations resume

I realize on reflection and reading the reviews that The Count of Monte Cristo is an Ur story like War of the Worlds that keeps getting retold in cinema and pop literature. The Shawshank Redemption V for Vendetta Creed III (backwards?) Gladiator The Patriot It’s such a satisfying plot template!

Everyone who is actually studying 3I/ATLAS would be doing what they are doing regardless of Avi Loeb; just without having to debunk his nonsense at the same time.

Just found this old wedding photo of me! Man, do I look sharp…

I suspect that 2025 US6 is actually SSN 60058, the Chinese DRO-B lunar probe, in a 144000 x 382000 km x 28.2 deg orbit

G (15) is a big fan of the Dumas novels and I had heard good things, so today we binged on the 2024 French version of the Count of Monte Cristo. SO GOOD. It's a gorgeous, superbly acted, morally nuanced popcorn cinema adaptation of a guilty pleasure of a novel and it's perfect.

This is also a very weak bound, because comet astrometry tends to have large systematic errors due to coma asymmetry biasing the fitting of the nucleus position, which is hard for orbit fitting software to handle. In practice, comet positions/orbital parameters being 10+ sigma off is not uncommon.

The easy way to do the calculation would be to put the astrometry into an orbit fitting program with nongravitational parameters, like find_orb. I just did that, and the 3-sigma upper bound on A1 (radial nongrav at 1 au) is ~5e-7 au/d^2 (~2x that of `Oumuamua), so it's bigger than... ~50 m.

Also, I outlined the howlers in his order-of-magnitude calculation but if anyone has a better calculation constraining its mass based on its quality of fit to Keplerian motion please let me know! 🔭🧪

I found some time to work out some of the things that are wrong in Loeb's latest calculation. When you are fitting data, you are not sensitive to all deviations from your model, only those that your model can't absorb! Anyway, happy to receive corrections from Planetary Science Bluesky. 🔭🧪

An interesting use of bibliometric indices is to apply them to journals or fields: RNAAS has an h-index of 41 (not bad!) and an m-index of 4.6 (outstanding!). ApJ: h=665 m=5.5 SETI has an h-index of 51 @chrislintott.bsky.social

It's up. Fortunately, they were able to get ahold of Darryl Seligman by deadline. Avi is prominently featured, but not in the headlines I see and his stuff is sandwiched between Darryl's and mine. www.newsweek.com/comet-from-a...

I'm looking for examples of formally unstable, actively controlled systems where failure of active control leads to catastrophic loss of the system. Only example I can think of is aerodynamically unstable military aircraft—is it true they crash without FBW? Are there other examples?

Just got a call from Newsweek asking about 3I/ATLAS. 😬 I did my best to tell them explain that I'm not a comet expert and that they need to quote planetary scientists, but they're on a tight deadline so I'm worried it'll just be me with a soupçon of Avi for the clicks. We'll see. 🤞

Harvard Astro definitely doesn’t want us talking about how much of their reputation is riding on the hard work of Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and isn’t really because of Harvard at all 👀

We could talk about why even among astronomers Harvard is treated like the gold standard and how our own attitudes toward Harvard are completely enabling him. That’s not the fault of tenure.

Honestly, if I had to pick problem people at Harvard, I’d start with the people who write brazenly racist shit about Black people and get away with it but somehow astronomers never call for the end of tenure when they are at it again 🤷🏽‍♀️🤷🏽‍♀️🤷🏽‍♀️

I don't allow cheat sheets, but I do give the questions ahead of time ("here are 10 questions, 3 will be on the test"). Not sure which option puts the students most at ease. The grade averages are almost always invariant to style so it's just a matter of making students comfortable in the exam.

I always did the “Here are the 10 exam questions for the course, you’ll receive 5 of them, and answer 3 of your choice” route for exams as a middle school and high school teacher. It’s incredibly powerful to give young people agency over their learning.

Randy Richardson let us students in his Global Tectonic Processes grad class bring in one sheet of paper with whatever we wanted on it, that we had to turn in with the exam. Making the sheet was a really effective review for me. He used it to see what we thought was important and/or difficult.

One thing I learned TA'ing for Alex Filippenko was that letting students make arbitrarily detailed cheat sheets was a fantastic way to let certain students organize their thoughts and distill class information. A learning experience that helped them on the test much more than the cheat sheet did!

Yes, this! I've easily navigated Japan, Amsterdam, NYC, and other places on my first day thanks to Google Maps. A major barrier is always every transit system's bespoke payment methods. Phone-tap public transit payments should be universal!

Some interesting ideas here! The clincher for me is that when acceptance rates get too low, it became a waste of our collective time to spend so much energy writing and reviewing outstanding proposals that do not get funded.

I am reminded that nickel and iron vapor produced by the carbonyl process have been observed around numerous solar system comets for 30 years now: www.nature.com/articles/s41... arxiv.org/pdf/2107.05932 As well as nickel and iron cooked out of sungrazing comets having been observed in the 1880s.

Gail Devers Sir Mix-A-Lot Ann Wilson Ichiro (of the actual game, not ceremonial) Stone Gossard Bill Nye Jim Zorn Kenny G (yes, don’t be snobby about it)

Today JPL lost so many incredible people. My heart hurts for every single one of them. This administration is gutting American science institutions and throwing away hyper specific experts who cannot be replaced. This is an extremely detrimental loss.

So many spectacular, kind, brave people who I've worked with for years being let go from JPL today. We will all be poorer for their absence from the forefront of human knowledge.

What are the best Rocky-style films to show my 11-year-old next? You know the genre: plucky underdog, training montage, villainous final opponent, unlikely victory (if only moral). We’ve done Karate Kid and Strictly Ballroom now (and all the Rocky films). What are the other greats here?

Now that we’ve finished the Rocky/Creed movies A(11) and I have moved on to other sports films. Field of Dreams, The Natural, Eight Men Out. All winners! I wasn’t sure how he’d like it, but tonight we did Strictly Ballroom. Huge hit! So good. And not the formula film I remembered!

baseball is the best preparation for death because it does not come with a clock that tells you when your suffering will end one way or the other

I have aged 17 years in the last 3 innings of this mariners game