In order to view the #solarwind, PUNCH also captures literally everything in the sky that is within 45° of the Sun. When Comet 2025 R2 (SWAN) was announced, we looked for it in the data, and there it was! Here's a blog post about it. ☀️🛰️🔭🧪 whtwnd.com/punch-missio...

It's surprisingly tricky to curate #heliophysics and keep spam at bay. Kudos to those who run the big/more-popular lists! I use regexps, a block list, and a little attention to keep heliophysics in and other things out. Please LMK if I'm getting the balance right, or if you'd like it tweaked! ☀️

Interesting #art #sculpture seen in the #Prague airport. "Pegasus", 2010.

It took years, but I digitized and ditched my wall of binders full of Xeroxed journal articles on paper. I love #Zotero. But I'm starting to have 2nd thoughts about going all-digital. This morning I opened up Gosling 1997 ("CMEs: an Overview") and was greeted with this. Yikes! ☀️🧪

Hey #Costco , it is September 13. September. It is not even the equinox yet. Why are your #Christmas decorations up?

More interesting vanishing points. This skybridge is in Manchester, UK. "Feels" like noir science fiction set from the 1990s.

What a coincidence! This is the meeting I left Prague to attend! Enroute now from Solar Polarization Workshop XII to UKSWSE III. ☀️

It’s easy to forget, in a world of humongous jetliners like the A380, just how huge and imposing even a “little” EJ commuter jet is when seen from up close. We lost something by switching to sanitized enclosed jetway chutes at most airports.

Pretty. I walked through here while adjusting to jet-lag yesterday, just before heading back to the hotel to crash and sleep.

I just climbed into the largest aircraft I have ever flown in. Lots of planetary scientists and other solar people in here too. The A380 is truly enormous.

Thanks, @ellecordova.bsky.social. We’re trying. 🧪

This cartoon is from 2006 but is still relevant today, 19 years later.

With another bright halo CME crossing the solar system and coming right at us, I'm feeling like a kid a couple of days before Christmas: when the PUNCH data turn up in the next day or two, it's going to be gorgeous! (@PUNCH-mission.bsky.social)

It's moments like this, when I find myself in an international teleconference with ~100 of the world's leading astronomers, discussing how we're all tracking an interstellar comet streaking across our solar system, that I wonder whether we're really living in the Marvel Comics universe.

It's hard to grasp the scale of DKIST without going to see it. That "small"hole in the dome is over 4 meters across. Results like this are generated by the physical telescope of course, but it's also a mountain of very, very clever post-processing methods to mitigate effects of our atmosphere. ☀️🔭🧪

The #heliophysics feed has been spotty for several weeks: the feed provider had scaling issues as they grow. I've switched it back to @skyfeed.app for now. hopefully it will do a better job of picking up matching stuff from the firehose. Please tag me if you notice any issues. ☀️

Welcome to the #heliophysics feed! Solar, heliospheric, geospace, and space weather relevant posts, lightly curated. Reply and express your interest, to be able to post here with "☀️". Liking the feed (click "Heliophysics" in your "# Feeds" tab, then ♡ → ♥️) will help new users to find it.

#Starlink is now being used by 6M people, according to a #SpaceX email I got today. That's something like of $6B/year just in ISP fees. Last year SpaceX made just over $4B launching Falcon 9s. So SpaceX really is now a global #ISP with a side business in launching rockets.

Congratulations to Waratah Seed-1 for winning the SmallSat Mission of the Year award! #SmallSat 🚀🛰️☀️

The #PUNCH mission is a finalist for the AIAA "Small Satellite Mission of the Year." Vote here if you'd like to support this incredible success! aiaasmstcawards0491.survey.fm/moty2025 #space #astronomy #astrophotography #Heliophysics 🛰️🔭🦛

The #AIAA #Smallsat conference is going on right now. PUNCH is a finalist for their "Smallsat Mission of the Year" award! Please take a moment to click through and vote "standing ovation" for PUNCH! Voting is open through Tuesday 12-August. ☀️🛰️🚀 sites.google.com/aiaa-smstc.o...

I will never get used to just how fast those things skedaddle. “Bat out of Hell” springs to mind, but Meatloaf was never that zippy.

Encourage discussion with open-ended questions. It's easy! Wrong: Do you like to watch baseball? Right: What the hell's wrong with you?

In case you're wondering what's wrong with your #starlink right now, it's apparently down globally. Reddit has some threads on it, in r/starlink.

This is wonderful news. SWFO-L1 is something we've needed to deploy since at least 1998.

TRACERS and @punch-mission.bsky.social were selected at the same time, and there are significant crossovers between the two missions' science. I can't wait to see our sister mission go!

It's hard to capture the magic of train travel – especially the Moffat Tunnel line. Very civilized. Incredible scenery. Check out that giant rock, part of the Boulder flatirons formation. We tunneled through. Took #amtrak under the Divide to Winter Park, then walked home to Nederland. #backpacking

Here's where we camped Friday night (in the krummholz down below), after scrambling down next to the snowfield in the foreground. Gorgeous cirque, and a great reward for a 12-mile half-day (Amtrak dropped us off at noon, this was nearly 7pm) #backpacking #hiking #colorado #amtrak

This weekend my son and I took the train to Winter Park (visible in the background) and walked home to Nederland. It was pretty epic: just 30 miles, but we crossed some of the most spectacular scenery Colorado has to offer. #colorado #hikes #winterpark #backpacking #amtrak

My whimsical project: DASH, a robotic heliospheric imager that demonstrated the PUNCH mission could work from below the Van Allen belts. 11 years ago, we mounted DASH to my home, high in the Rockies. (My house happens to be below the Van Allen belts and also somewhat easier to reach than orbit.) ☀️🔭🛰️

Tomorrow (2-Jul) is the anniversary of "Lawnchair" Larry Walters' flight over LA. Carrying just beer, sandwiches, a pellet gun, and several dozen weather balloons tied to his lawnchair, he flew above 15,000 ft. A triumph of whimsy and personal will. Never let sanity get in the way of your dreams.

If you're within driving distance of D.C. and reading this, you should be at NASA HQ THIS MONDAY! Deets here! sites.google.com/view/nasa-ne... If you're not close, go to the Planetary Society site instead www.planetary.org/save-nasa-sc... and follow the directions to help save NASA science. 🧪🛰️🔭⚛️🎢

⚠️ Bear with us on the #heliophysics feed – the host is having trouble with their firehose upstream and miss some posts. They're working on a fix. Meanwhile, If you tag a post here and don't see it after a while, please self-reply & tag me and I'll manually add it. Hopefully this is very temporary.

Lots of exciting stuff coming out about magnetography. Notoriously, solar magnetographs are hard to calibrate. My longtime colleague Han Uitenbroek did the legwork to actually forward-model the entire light-emission process from a high fidelity solar model, and found something very surprising. ☀️🧪

Tagging this so the #heliophysics feed picks it up!

The first thing that springs to mind, @carlbergstrom.com, is that "a few months ago" was April Fools.

OMG! The new season of Phineas and Ferb – which seems to have lost some of the spark of the original, but still has moments of greatness – has a song about the magnetosphere! "Aurora Perryalis" (S5, Ep6). ☀️

Wow, @chrislintott.bsky.social, this is amazing! What are you using to identify all the new moving objects in the data? Is there an open-source package?

This is really cool. ESA's PROBA-3 is two spacecraft that fly in precise formation ~200m apart. One acts as a disconnected occulter for the other, generating a real artificial eclipse to reveal the Sun's corona. Congratulations to Andrei Zukhov and team for an astounding accomplishment! ☀️🛰️🧪

Hey! Lookie what PUNCH (@punch-mission.bsky.social) just saw! Two different solar storms crossing the entire inner solar system! NASA's site doesn't thumbnail well, so click the link for the movie and other images. ☀️🔭🛰️🧪 science.nasa.gov/blogs/punch/...

That is a pretty stylish lanyard!

This is literally what is about to happen to the U.S. scientific space fleet. If the President's budget is enacted by Congress, nearly all functioning heliophysics space missions will be canceled or severely cut, squandering decades of work and ceding the U.S.A.'s hard-won space leadership. 🧪🛰️🔭☀️

The National Solar Observatory's 4-meter Inouye Solar Telescope, funded by NSF, just discovered something new on the Sun: magnetic striations only a few tens of kilometers across, which affect the Texas-sized granules that carry solar energy to the surface (to become sunlight)! ☀️🧪🔭⚛️

This article describes a constellation that does pretty much exactly what PUNCH (@punch-mission.bsky.social) does. Except PUNCH does it all from near Earth, using polarization. Oh ... and PUNCH isn't speculation, it is in orbit and publishing image data right now. punch.space.swri.edu

www.planetary.org/press-releas... ☀️🧪🔭🛰️

Amazing clarity from the NSF-funded Goode Solar Telescope at Big Bear Solar Observatory! ☀️🔭🧪

Telecom today is truly amazing. I am typing in my home near Boulder (USA), but also "in" Chiba (Japan); I'm listening there to a great talk by Aneta Wiśniewska, who is physically in Potsdam (Germany). In-person meetings remain very important, but Zoom is so so much better than what we had before.☀️🧪

Every bit downlinked from space costs money. So if you're designing a mission that makes a lot of data ... ☀️🛰️🔭🧪⚛️🚀

PUNCH science data are now available at the PUNCH website! punch.space.swri.edu.

Interesting... since I manage a couple of different accounts, it shouldn't be surprising. But I got cross-threaded: my initial reply came from the account where I was signed-in at WhiteWind, not the one where I was signed in at BlueSky. We live and learn.