Wrapping up our senior field trip to Arizona! Got amazing tours of Lowell Observatory, the LDT, the Grand Canyon, and we observed with BU's Perkins Telescope for student projects. As always, thanks to our gift fund and generous donors who help sponsor these trips!

Hats off to the BU Astronomy Graduate Students who organized an excellent Boston Area (Exo)Planetary Science Meeting last week! Photo credit: Laura Chin

Ugh these announcers. Less is more fellas. Never thought I’d say this, but I miss Joe Buck. I miss Vin Scully even more.

Brief life update: On Monday I resigned from my appointment at Lowell Observatory. I wish my remaining friends and colleagues the best of luckin their endeavors in increasing new visitor center visitation, and continuing to pursue world-class research in the face of having ended tenure today.

Congratulations to Dr. Allison McCarthy, who successfully defended her PhD “The Physical Basis for L and T Dwarf Variability” on Friday! Allie is now off to Trinity College Dublin for a postdoc with the ExoAimsir group led by Prof. Johanna Vos! 🪐🔭 @alliemccarthy.bsky.social @johannavos.bsky.social

Four charts showing the extent of cuts to NASA in the FY26 budget: - Cuts to every science division - Smallest science funding since 1984 - 19 active, inflight missions cancelled - Smallest NASA budget since FY 1961

Congrats to my colleague Merav Opher on winning a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship! And congrats to BU for tying with Princeton for the most Guggenheim fellows this year (6)!

Thank you to our Perkins-Telescope-partner North Carolina A&T @ncatsuaggies.bsky.social for hosting me for their Physics Colloquium this week! I had a wonderful time meeting with their undergrads, grad students, and faculty, and talking about small stars, brown dwarfs and exoplanets!

Check out our newest results from JWST, led by @alliemccarthy.bsky.social and published today in ApJ Letters! 🔭🪐

Check out the press release for our recent work using JWST observations of SIMP0136! Also published today on ApJL: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...

Excited to share this press release of our investigation into the atmosphere of a "rogue planet"!

Recently forwarded an article by @griffithobserv.bsky.social about the unknown telescope in Hugo Ballin's mural in their rotunda. Turns out it's BU's own Perkins Telescope! A "modern telescope" that we still think is pretty modern 😇 griffithobservatory.org/exhibits/w-m...

In Lewis Lapham’s last Notebook for Harper’s, he wrote that reading history “lessons our fears of what might happen tomorrow.” Wow, was he wrong about that.

It’s my birthday and my wife got me a label maker 😍 You can probably guess my age from how happy I am about this gift.

My first thought: Must be intensity interferometry because there’s no way they are beam combining that many telescopes, unless each is heterodyned with an LFC and amp/phase written to disk. [Reads acronym, looks at poster]🤦‍♂️

Really hoping the Social Security Fairness Act passes the Senate this week. My mom lives on a meager Texas teacher’s pension (below poverty earnings) but can’t collect her or my late father’s social security from their non-govt work because of the GPO provision. SSFA would fix that!

Check out BU PhD-student @alliemccarthy.bsky.social's paper just accepted to ApJL! JWST spectral light curves of SIMP 0136 show clear pressure-dependence, indicating three variability mechanisms: clouds, hot spots and C chemistry. @johannavos.bsky.social is the JWST PI! arxiv.org/abs/2411.16577

Another paper from our BU-RIT-UToronto collaboration on benchmark post common envelope binaries (close white dwarf + main sequence stars). Graduating UToronto PhD student Steffani Grondin's catalog of PCEBs in open clusters is published! www.dunlap.utoronto.ca/astronomers-...

Pro tip: If you are writing NSF proposals and can't upload it because research(dot)gov says you don't have a broader impacts section, when most definitely do have a broader impacts section, try moving your figures further from the broader impacts heading.

Not sure how many New England Falls we have left on this planet, but yesterday's Boston Half Marathon could not have been nicer.

Several years ago I sent a random message to a generic NASA inquires email about WORF on the ISS for a possible experiment. Don Pettit replied and sent a photo…from space.

Every department has one. Or several. Or all 😂

Great talks at Cool Stars 22 by BU PhD students Caeley Pittman and Allie McCarthy!

If you missed BU-PhD-student Allie McCarthy's awesome weather-app-inspired poster at Exoplanets V, you can catch the TALK version at Cool Stars 22 on Monday!

The third largest tall ship in the world is currently a block from my apartment. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish...

Thanks to a college friend for pointing me to George Dyson's Symphony in G. I had no idea Freeman Dyson's father was a (knighted) composer. www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3-a...

Hey I know that one.

Bunky, the Bunker Hill turkey, stands watch over Charlestown. Apparently wild turkeys can fly? Or she just took the stairs @universalhub.com

10 years of service to Boston University including endless thankless roles (grad admissions, faculty council, gen ed council, grad AND undergrad curriculum revision committees, observatory director, Nat Sci taskforce, to name a few) and yet my daughter was still denied a spot in BU daycare. 🤬

I’m 1\3 with traveling for totality. Shanghai in 2008 and Rochester today were cloudy. But makes me realize how special it was to see the 2017 one in Nashville! So happy for everyone who saw it today!

Job alert! North Carolina A&T, a partner in the Perkins Telescope Observatory, is hiring in Astronomy & Astrophysics! jobs.ncat.edu/postings/31241

New paper (accepted to ApJ) led by BU PhD student Allison McCarthy. She used the PINES reduction algorithm to (re)analyze multiwavelength observations of SIMP 0136, a planetary mass object. We suggest 2 patchy cloud layers can explain the results, though atm models struggle to match the data!

🔭🧪

Bonding leave started today. Ferry ride to the Aquarium! It’s 26F and icy but baby has the Marimekko spacesuit.

🚨🚨I'm hiring !!🚨🚨 I’m looking for a Research Fellow to join my team at Trinity College Dublin to work on Extrasolar Atmospheres ☘️🪐☁️🔭 Deadline: December 31st  Ad: jobregister.aas.org/ad/c1a19f23 Please share widely!

🫣https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023arXiv231107699D/abstract

US-based astronomers' best friend this week: \linespread{1.1513}

Octopus costume for me and the quadroweek.

Sam was my first friend in college. We met summer of 2001 for orientation at the University of Michigan. She went on to become a powerful force for peace and progress in Michigan and Detroit. This news is shocking, hard to believe, and just horrible. www.nytimes.com/2023/10/21/u...

A new dome for the Perkins Telescope! www.bu.edu/articles/202...

Big news at BU! www.bu.edu/articles/202...

A very proud day for BU, especially for the Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine: www.bu.edu/articles/202...

My attempt at reposting to the Astronomy Feed! 🔭

Boston Univ Postdoc Fellows program for early-career scholars with a commitment to interdisciplinary & inclusive scholarship. All Scholars will be assigned one or more suitable faculty mentors from relevant dept Applications due 11:59 PM EST October 16, 2023. www.bu.edu/cas/career-d... #philsci

BU Astro is hiring! Happy to answer questions about the search, our department and our resources. academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/25624

Little Amal is here!

“It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day. That’s the hard part. But it does get easier.” … “Ok”

Cool Stars 22 Invited Speakers have been announced! coolstars22.github.io/program.html

JAXA's pre-stream EDM > NASA's IMO. More bars before repeat. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TTT...

The dome reskinning project at the Perkins Telescope is almost complete! Only a few more panels at the top to replace! (Photo credit: Observatory Manager Colt Pauley.)