Thinking about poster presentations today in our weekly group meeting. Remember to use white space, font size, and graphic design to draw people in. This oldie-but-goodie is a nice reminder of that. 🧪

This is sort of a big deal. The Alfvén surface is a theoretical surface (sort of a hydrodynamic "event horizon") and it sets the outer boundary of the solar corona. Mapping it tells us about everything from the solar cycle to how the interplanetary magnetic field is regulated. ☀️🧪

Thanks for keeping this visible, @solarshea.bsky.social ! Dismantling NCAR would be yet another terrible blow to the science infrastructure that made this nation great. 🧪☀️

Happy birthday, @punch-mission.bsky.social! One year (minus two hours) ago as I post, this (pic) happened in California. 40 min later, the 4 PUNCH satellites deployed over Africa. Since then, we've downlinked ~1.5 million images of space – and changed the way humanity sees our environment. ☀️🛰️🧪🔭

On this special day...

Funny how odd corners of the language pop up from time to time. Today I was reminded that at least a dozen English words (beak, peak, peck, peek, pica, picante, pick, picket, [mag]pie, pike, pique, and poke) all derive from the same original root meaning "pointy". #etymology

This was a year ago. A week after that, we launched PUNCH! 🛰️🔭☀️

This week I visited Reed College, my alma mater from the 1980s. Highlights included dinner with the physics department (including Mary James and David Griffiths) and touring my old haunts at the Reed Research Reactor. Wonderful department - highly recommended. ⚛️🎢🧐

<thud>! Another PUNCH paper dropped today! Congratulations to Sarah Gibson on this omnibus theoretical treatment of polarization in solar wind structures. Given the simplicity of the Thomson scattering mechanism, it's pretty amazing how deep the rabbit hole can go. 🧪☀️⚛️🔭🛰️ bit.ly/4qT9Kvs

To my Portland friends: I'm returning to the Reed campus this week, to give the physics seminar (and a special guest lecture on image processing). If you're in the area and would like to connect, DM me -- it's been a long time since I've seen most of you. www.reed.edu/physics/semi...

Today I had the amazing opportunity to view @swri.org's second printing (1710) of Galilei's "Dialogo". It once belonged to a "Vittorio", who scrawled his name on the flyleaf. Nice to think that, as scientists, we're part of a long story populated with like-minded folks across the years. #rarebooks 🧪

PUNCH data are spectacular — but the metadata (data about the data and about the spacecraft that collect them) are also pretty cool. ☀️🔭🧪

Scientific illustration is still not accessible to the big AIs. Here's a prompt I gave Gemini (after asking it if it could generate SVGs), together with the absolute nonsense it produced in response. #AIslop #wut #gemini

I caught this rare picture of the contrail compound being loaded on an aircraft! The plane's contrail generator (1 of 2) is the large nacelle to the right of the workman. A chemical reaction inside it creates CO2 but also dihydrogen monoxide, which makes visible trails in the air. #chemtrails

It's not every day you get to announce a new research article -- especially one you've worked on for a complete solar cycle. The PUNCH article came out in the journal Solar Physics today! ☀️🛰️🔭🧪 rdcu.be/e0XlR

This is actually very cool. Coronagraphs that "create artificial eclipses in space" date to the late 1960s and many still operate (PUNCH, CCOR, SECCHI, LASCO). ASPIICS uses two separate spacecraft. MESOM will actually use the Moon itself as an occulter: a true "artificial eclipse in space". 🧪🛰️🔭☀️

Hey @officialbenshapiro.bsky.social, how do you feel about this quote now?

We're finishing up the rollout of Version 0j of the #PUNCH data, and several very cool science papers are in progress. Here's a very cool result on #Comet #Lemmon and the #solarwind! 🔭☀️🛰️🧪

The @nytimes.com opens with this plot today. I found it shocking until I realized what the data are really telling us. We simply have no "shared truth" (and haven't for some time). Folks literally do not see the injustice. This plot is the consequence of heavily curated "news" (e.g. #FauxNews).

This reminds me of the warning sign I saw last year at Surf Beach, CA -- which, now that I think of it, is a good indicator of a healthy (aka neglected-by-people) ecosystem.

Remember to watch for #aurora tonight! ☀️🔭

Wow! You have got to see the spectacular prominence eruptions in this latest movie from the European PROBA-3 mission! Congratulations to Andrei Zhukov and his team! 🧪🛰️🔭☀️

Glad to see that #NASA is about to dispose of four more of those darned #RS-25 engines. SSMEs were a great idea in the 1970s, but they're optimized wrong (for maximum ΔP/Δm, not for maximum ΔP/$).

Sometime recently, #starlink quietly updated their #ToS and opted all users in to allowing shadowy "trusted collaborators" to train #AI on your #personal-info information. There's an opt-out option in the configuration settings, if you don't want this to happen.

We had a great time when my son and his girlfriend came to visit over the holidays. Encountered a little turbulence in downtown Denver. #train #turbulence #illusions

Congratulations, @mathewjowens.bsky.social! Many thanks (again) for your longstanding support of #heliophysics!

Technology quietly advances on all fronts. As a boy scout I carried 50ft of 300lb nylon paracord (~the size of a corn dog) in my pack: much better than bulky hemp rope. Today I carry 100ft of 500lb test kevlar line in my breast pocket - the size of a pack of gum. What's amazing is it's NBD to get.

PUNCH sees the noontime sky as you've never seen it before! ☀️🔭🛰️🧪

Here's a release that came out of @swri.org this morning. You'll want to click through and see our awesome movies of the inner solar system! We just presented them at the #AGU2025 meeting this morning. 🧪🛰️🔭☀️

This morning I had the singular pleasure of visiting the Lake Ponchartrain causeway (world's longest over-water causeway, I'm told) and examining it with binoculars. It was a cloudy, blustery day but I can confirm that, yes, the world is round.

This is one of many reasons we launched the PUNCH mission (punch.space.swri.edu), which is studying whether we can track "Stealth" CMEs across the void between planets. ☀️🔭🛰️🧪

Here's a little more info on the @swri.org team that tracked 3I/ATLAS using @punch-mission.bsky.social data! ☀️🔭🧪🛰️🚀

Here's a fun science nugget from @PUNCH-mission.bsky.social: a colorized polarimetric image of the extended solar corona, with bonus dust trails from a micrometeoroid impact! ☀️🛰️🔭

PUNCH @punch-mission.bsky.social found out we are good at comet tracking, even as we calibrate/refine our solar wind imaging pipeline. In the last 3 months, we've tracked 3 notable comets with images every 4 min, around the clock: SWAN, Atlas, and Lemmon. PUNCH data are free to get and use. ☀️🛰️🧪🔭

"There's something about the outside of a horse that's good for the inside of a man" -- discovering my inner #TeddyRoosevelt. (#horses, #trailriding)

Swiss Dawn from the 61C intercity Bern->Basel. Had a great week at ISSI, participating in the solar eclipse/middle-corona conference by day and PUNCH support by night.

Now it can (finally) be told. We've been tracking Comet 3I more or less continuously with PUNCH. Everything is fine. 3I is definitely very interesting – but it is most definitely *not* an alien spaceship undergoing maneuvers, no matter what that Boston guy says. ☀️🛰️🔭🧪 #3I #comet #not_aliens

Solar data analysis has changed so, so much since the late 1900s. We're working to calibrate out orbital-dependent variable stray light in PUNCH. I pulled 5 days of L0 data to play with, in my laptop, while traveling. The dataset includes 20,000 images, in 32 GB. ☀️ (punch.space.swri.edu)

Still going on! 10pm MST, 40°N, 105°W. Lots of dynamics and structure. #aurora ☀️🔭

From my backyard in the Colorado Rockies, a few minutes ago (about 2025-11-12T03:30Z; 11/11/25 8:30pm MST) #aurora 🔭🧪☀️

The Proba-3/ASPIICS paper just dropped on ArXiV! If you like heliophysics, the corona, or cool mission concepts, give it a read. ASPIICS is a coronagraph comprising two spacecraft in formation: a camera and a separate occulter. They're producing amazing images. ☀️🛰️🔭🚀 arxiv.org/abs/2511.01679

Kevin Marvel is leaving AAS. ☀️🧪🔭 aas.org/press/aas-an...

This is exactly the reason every mission and scientist should have a wide-open data policy! PUNCH has specific science objectives (looking at the solar wind) – but in the right hands the data can reveal amazing things NOT part of our original science. Giving those hands access is best for all. ☀️🔭🧪

Cluster is an amazing story: the initial flight build were all lost in the Ariane V launch – possibly from the most expensive one-line software bug ever (integer overflow in a guidance system, which caused the >$1B rocket to explode). Ultimately very successful despite that "little setback".

We will greatly miss Al Nagler, founder of Tele Vue Optics (@televueoptics.bsky.social), who left us Monday. I was honored to know him: a brilliant man with a gentle and joyful disposition. Among many other accomplishments, he designed the Wide Field Imager optics in use on the PUNCH mission. ☀️🔭

I'm delighted to see that @swri.org has joined us here! Southwest Research Institute does a ton of interesting things, but of course #heliophysics is one of them. The outreach/social-media team are really great, give 'em a follow! You won't be sorry. 🧪 (bsky.app/profile/swri...)

There's been a large uptick in the amount of AI slop lately on all topics in all venues, including #heliophysics here. I've been updating the feed regexps to remove certain keywords typical of "fake news" clickbait, so hopefully the news quality will remain high. Let me know if you see any issues. ☀️

Don't ever change, Apple Photos AI. You are very helpful. No, really. Without you, I might have confused this for a picture of a golden retriever.

Sometimes we all need a little boddhi satva in our lives. Or a big one.

Wow. It can be hard to remember: science in general and #NASA and #heliophysics in particular are still revered globally. This am in the security line in Delhi (coming home) I handed @punch-mission.bsky.social and NASA stickers to kids. They lit up so much at meeting a real live scientist. ☀️🛰️🧪