This is literally what the actual "siege" of the auxiliary ICE building looks like

This week began my new grad class on time domain astro. Wrapped first class with an activity: campfire stories, draw the light curve of a camp fire. Students had a ton of great intuition and I hope it sets the stage for some critical data analysis! 🔭🧪⛺️🪵🔥

New dice from The Dice Lab (me and Robert Fathauer), which may (?) be useful if you regularly write equations. youtube.com/shorts/fgMox...

For those of you who don't know, I used to be a professional landscape artist! I've made an account for my art here on bsky, and I'll be trying to post a painting every day from my back catalogue. Follow to see how I developed as an artist over the years!

The JWST had a new look into the IC348 star forming region last year, and here's my processed image of that observation! 🔭 IC348 is located some 1,000 light years away from us and is made of hundreds of new stars born there. HD: flic.kr/p/2ruCvCz

I'm excited to announce that after two years, my Masters project has finally been submitted to MNRAS and is available to read on arXiv! 1/4 arxiv.org/abs/2509.10674

you can export .pptx slides to pngs with Office365, but if you want to change the dpi of the .png end product you need to *hard code* the dpi into a registry subkey on your computer... what the hell even is Windows

I've been nothing but a paragon of civility while using my fork and knife to carve a bit of your flesh out—just a bit, not even a lot—and you've done nothing but argue loudly and even scream at me.

While housing is not a human right, investment absolutely is. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

My petition to the 🇦🇺 Australian government: make part-time PhD students' stipends tax exempt! 📋 Read and sign here: www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/... ⏰ Deadline: October 1

just ate instant noodles while watching The Bear and i feel like a criminal

had a dream about resolving Overleaf comments

the final insult of AI is going to be forcing us all to become linux guys. we're all going to be like oh yeah downloading stuff on linux is super easy you just juice the tarball and compile the pulp in the sudo command line. not like windows where you have to click on things

Just make it exist first. You can make it worse with each new pass while getting increasingly frustrated later.

wow two astrobites in two weeks!? come and read about a beautiful dusty nebula as imaged with JWST!

It is but, sadly, I think the majority of these people are turning to these hallucination machines because they don't *want* to put the work in. They just saw someone made a cool thing that people like and they want in on it. They want the accolades without the effort.

Images from Palomar at 2 different infrared wavelengths last night - one that Saturn's methane atmosphere absorbs, and one the it reflects! (The faint point source is the moon, Tethys!) Taken by David Ciardi, Catherine Clark, @lowbacca.bsky.social and Miranda Felsmann; animated by me (and ezgif!)

we need to bring back newspapers on the train. i read only the hardest hitting journalism on my morning commute, thanks to @bencollins.bsky.social

i’ve never seen so many people in one place as i did today while marching over the sydney harbour bridge. end the genocide now.

Timelapse of the altocumulus undulatus clouds over Brisbane yesterday

Any popular article about how AI is improving science that does not make clear the distinction between specialized models trained for a specific task and “AI” in the popular parlance (i.e. LLMs, Chat GPT) is doing a disservice to readers imo

Today I had the pleasure to present at the ESO journal club. It was very scary but I am so excited to develop my sci-comm skills! 🌌🎤

Heard the latest news from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration? We detected the collision of the most massive pair of black holes so far: #GW231123 weighing in at ~137 + ~103 times the mass of the Sun! So to celebrate, here’s a handy chart ✨ Just how chonky are these black holes? 🤔

not a bad effort! god i love australian music

3 hours of chat gpeetee can save you thirty minutes of just reading the literature

my favorite oc

new from me! it's binaries all the way down

Curious about our recent paper and our brand new JWST image of Apep? Take a look at this great writeup in The Conversation from Ben!

Exciting news! My second first-author paper is out on the arXiv today!! arxiv.org/abs/2507.14610 We present a brand new JWST image of the Apep colliding wind binary in the mid-infrared, and we study what this nebula can tell us about the THREE stars in it's centre. Read on for more... 1/?🔭🧪

oh so it's illegal to have friends now, is it? it's cancellable to send your friend nice little birthday notes? the woke mob has come for poetry? for nice little drawings to your buds?

Probably just a coincidence that the chatbot reached for an adjective to describe a woman and found "hysterical."

astro conference try not to paint their webpage with genAI images challenge (impossible)

i’m really liking bluesky’s new notifications for when people like your repost. helps to know that my reposts are appreciated!

TIL (on mastodon) that the US National Park Service has crochet patterns! www.nps.gov/articles/000...

If someone wants to hear guitar music they can fire up Spotify or they can sit in their room picking out chords and start building their finger muscles. And ChatGPT is Spotify, but a physics lecture is guitar practice.

daily reminder that it is not at ALL harmless to use LLMs and GenAI image generators. you are stealing people’s work

go talk to a real person you antisocial weirdos jesus christ

live view of me trying to understand and edit a 50000+ line code (it is written in fortran) [the documentation is in french] {lord help me}

the one thing keeping me going right now is death-staring drivers that illegally run through pedestrian crossings

my culinary hot take is that spinach wilting during cooking is a feature not a bug

Meredith has always been a G, but it's still exceptionally weird and very refreshing hearing from a tech exec who can see through all of this AI bullshit for what it is at its foundation: a backdoor surveillance tool.

I tweet about this so much but it just kills my soul a little bit. I will tweet "AI stuff is boring trash" and get comments like "Yeah I totally agree but not in the case where I use it' and then they post their boring trash.

by age 30 you should have one friend for every major animal group to spam. seen a good crab post? forward to your token crab person. bat post for the bat person. cicada post for the cicada person. bear post for the bear person. jellyfish post for the jellyfish person. and so on and so forth.

Truly the most gutless group of politicians to ever run Australia. Not a spine among them. Not a word of dissent or debate in literally years. Now they're silent Trump cheerleaders and genocide supporters...

Introducing...your sneak peek at the cosmos captured by NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory! Can you guess these regions of sky? This is just a small peek...join us at 11am US EDT for your full First Look at how Rubin will #CaptureTheCosmos! 🔭🧪 #RubinFirstLook ls.st/rubin-first-look-livestream

Spotted a little sliver of the 22° sun halo over Sydney yesterday afternoon. A cool result of sunlight refracting through the ice crystals in those cirrus clouds!

When people said that there was a gas rig right next to the 12 Apostles, I really didn't expect it to be *this* close to the 12 Apostles. What the fuck!

Printing out a picture of a platypus for the next time someone asks me about the planetary status of Pluto

it’s 1991 and the US is preparing to invade the middle east it’s 2002 and the US is preparing to invade the middle east its 2025 and the US is preparing to invade the middle east

Imagine hearing that your friend has quit therapy and decided instead to ask the 'tell you exactly what you want to hear machine' for advice instead and saying "great I'll mention this in my article and encourage others to do so!!" ...without referencing the suicide of the child who also did that.