Ever wonder why human body temperature is 98.6? Why you take an infant to the hospital at 100.4? Why Americans worry about temperature at 18x the precision of folks from the rest of the world?? www.xkcd.com/3248/

🦊🐔🌾🚣 🦊🌾 🐔🚣 🦊🌾🚣 🐔 🦊 🌾🐔🚣 🦊🐔🚣 🌾 🐔 🌾🦊🚣 🐔🚣 🌾🦊 🦊🐔🌾🚣

OPPORTUNITY: The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, MD, is searching for an Archive Analyst, with a focus on user‑facing documentation and tutorials, to help advance our state‑of‑the‑art astronomical data archive. Python experience required: https://bit.ly/3YQDM7y

I’m hiring! Looking for someone with excellent communication skills, knows Python, and wants a career enabling science by creating user-facing content for astronomers. This is a full-time, long-term position that does NOT require a PhD! recruiting2.ultipro.com/SPA1004AURA/... 🔭 Apply by Feb 21st!

Sushi Shō on Solano ave. The sushi chef running it was so particular he couldn’t find anyone to work for him except his wife. So they only sat about half the seats. The sushi was absolutely unreal. And he would (lovingly) instruct you on how to eat it. Closed before 2008 and I still think of it.

She also said, of the Harvard astronomical plate archive, “there are more fish in that sea than have been drawn from it” This is how I see our data — a vast ocean teeming with discoveries yet to be caught.

Look folks, I get that AI has lots of possible negatives, and I think it is important that we honestly discuss them. But man, if I see another AI-centered article about datacenter power use that shows the dramatic growth in power use from 2021-2023 I am gonna lose it. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/b...

Petition to measure RA and Dec in decimal hours. Hare-core observers get their precious hours, the rest of us can use the decimal system and have symmetrical coordinates as god intended.

It’s bleak out there, but it’s heartening to know millions of people from all walks of life took the time to ruin one specific persons birthday, America’s hater spirit remains strong

This work by my collaborator Blakesley (with support from yours truly) is based on data made much more easily available by MAST! This paper would not have happened if we (esp. adrian lucy) hadn’t made this data so easy to use! Go @mast-news.bsky.social !!

As a person who has professionally done my own research on a number of things, let me say: I do not want to have to do my own research on most things. I am happy for experts to do research in their fields and publish their finds, and for service providers to read and summarize it for me.

🚨 A 50% cut to NASA science is on the table for 2026. This would kill missions, halt discoveries, and threaten thousands of jobs. The American Astronomical Society makes it super easy to tell Congress: fund NASA science. Speak up here: aas.org/urge-nasa-su...

“The Hubble Image Similarity Project” by RL White & @jegpeek.bsky.social - what a cool idea! arxiv.org/pdf/2504.17688. See also the WIRED article by @sarahscoles.bsky.social: www.wired.com/story/this-c...

90% of these images are of the ISM. There I said it!

Already built and on budget and on time!

David Brooks is ready to take it to the streets and Senator Van Hollen has demonstrated admirable resolve and compassion for a constituent in danger, let's make this the flapping of butterfly wings that causes a tornado

ok exactly how massive was the binary that caused this gravitational wave signal

Awesome to see UV telescope genius Aaron Tohuvavohu among this brilliant crowd!

r/askastronomy is a lot of this today: www.reddit.com/r/askastrono...

We are gonna make true 3D images of the cold neutral medium at milliparsec scales for the first time using light echoes from Cas A!

Vaccine for pancreatic cancer 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I’m having a challenge characterizing some of the noise in my jwst images. (1/f)

I think most people are intuitively aware of this but something like the official White House account posting an “ASMR” video of shackled immigrants is not just cruel for its own sake, it’s intentional envelope-pushing to ramp up to desensitization over inhumane detention, camps, and deaths

I have confirmed this is true. NASA's probationary employees were not terminated today. No reason was given.

You know what? We shouldn’t announce people’s pedigrees when they give colloquia. #showerthoughts

This has been such a great project to work on. It's just astonishing.

If you are at #AAS245, be sure to stop by the STScI booth and the MAST table there! Check out our mission tables (HST, JWST, Roman), see our accessible tactile displays and sonification options, talk to MAST staff on to see how to use our modern search tools to enable your research!

Sick as hell.

If you get carsick looking at your phone as a passenger, try these weird dots!

If you are a science professor you should know that this semester (perhaps for the first time in history) there may be dramatically different levels of access to AI tools (based on $) that can solve very advanced science problems.

Bwhahahaha

Well this is awesome: about.usps.com/newsroom/nat...

I'm generally apathetic towards AI. When I participated in user studies of this tool, I could maybe finally see a way that it could help astronomers do research. Awesome work by Iyer et al, including @jwuphysics.bsky.social, @jegpeek.bsky.social. 🔭🧪 ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024ApJS...

I see a lot of this sentiment, and I respect it. I also want us always to take a moment to ask "what does knowing facts mean?" and "what does it mean to reason?". It's a rare opportunity to think philosophically, which I think is always good to take.

Well, I feel I have finally joined the ranks of online astronomers— I have had my first Tim Tam Slam.

While I do think Nobels should be awarded to results, not people, this flex always gives me a smirk, I must admit. Yes there are 5 signs.

It was the Busta Rhymes It was the Wusta Rhymes

I don’t need to go on social media to have my worldview challenged I am in theoretical physics I have a new existential crisis daily

On my way to UC Berkeley tomorrow to give colloquium and fondly remembering my days of trying to stay awake through them 🥰 If you are looking for a speaker in the spring drop me a line!

if you astronomers haven't been to r/askastronomy yet I recommend it. I especially like that we have a developed a way to respond to most "what is this cool patch of stars I just took a picture of" questions: with r/itsalwayspleiades

Method and science both rad as heck. I love when astronomers get creative.

Did we get over this over this year?

TIL: SMOS is the VLA, but tiny, in space, and pointed down. Huh!

🌌🌌🌌🌌🌌🌌🌌🌌🌌🌌🌌 Holy crap Milky Way enthusiasts, get psyched! Roman Space Telescope has selected a Galactic plane survey as one of its main activities in the first 5 years. This would produce a catalog of 100,000,000,000+ stars and a dust map that extends across the Galactic plane!

Let's do space! Boooo Magellanic Clouds: americanornithology.org/about/englis...

How long until we fully red-code AI? As far as I can tell everything now needs to be red or blue, and I can see which way this one is going.

During the fog of war, please read any news while asking “does this confirm my priors?”

Its Nobel Prize week. The only 'good thing is that it gets media to cover science. Otherwise, it should be abandoned. It doesn't reflect how science is done, it gives weird incentives for research and, most importantly, it spreads a very wrong idea about science and scientists to the general public.