Happy to share that the "What's Your Map?" podcast just won a Gold Award for Best Education Podcast from the British Podcast Awards 2025 - you can find a link to the podcast I participated in about celestial maps via: oculi-mundi.com/heidi-hammel

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I just saw a clickbait article about how "AI helped fix JWST's blurry vision." For the record, JWST's vision is just fine! This article is talking about a quirky mode of one instrument that doesn't work well and which few astronomers use anyway. JWST is doing great - at the peak of its game!

RIP Donna www.rollingstone.com/music/music-...

We already recovered it with the Lowell Discovery Telescope this morning: cometary.org/@qicheng/sta...

I recommend this article by @meghanbartels.bsky.social and @leebillings.bsky.social for folks who are looking for *factual* information about why 3I/ATLAS is of interest to planetary astronomers: www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...

Update on the utterly normal activity of comet 3I/ATLAS: the lack of shenanigans continues - this is just a comet doing its comet thing.

3I/ATLAS is behaving just as a comet should. No shenanigans. Looking forward to the possibility of JUICE (a European spacecraft heading eventually to Jupiter) observing this object in the coming weeks!

Perhaps one of the more important posts you'll read in a long time if you care about the future of space exploration. My (biased) tl;dr = the history of spaceflight suggests that gutting NASA tech dev (inc its science side!) may actually gut the future of the "commercial" space programs as well

For my Hawai'i based friends - public talk at the @keckobservatory.bsky.social HQ in Waimea. John Grunsfeld, astronaut and Hubble repairman, will discuss "From the Hubble Space Telescope to the Habitable Worlds Observatory."

What Andy said!

Another STUNNING image from JWST, this time of the Red Spider Nebula—the vast, wispy, gaseous remains of a now-dead star, the white dwarf core still glowing in the centre.

Very cool image of Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) shows a reddish dust tail spiraling around the blue gas tail

Fresh JWST view of Uranus taken Oct 6 2025 with NIRCam. Full size & more info: flic.kr/p/2rByidu 🔭🧪 Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/Andrea Luck CC BY Proposal PI: Varun Bajaj Proposal ID: 8975 Filters: F150W2-F162M, F410M

Doing traffic duty with my assistant (son26) for the neighborhood’s Annual Halloween Parade

note to self: bring a trash bag (don't want "No Kings" to look like Charlie Kirk's funeral)

Double-vaxxed as of today: "strong" flu and covid. My immune system is ready to rumble!

Actually a good article once you get past the click-bait headline. The article itself correctly refers to astronomical image processing as "a careful scientific and artistic process that transforms invisible light in space into visible wavelengths humans can see" www.fodors.com/news/news/ho...

Procrastination takes may forms. Tonight as a service to the astronomical community I offer help with your JWST proposal titles. #JWST 🧪🔭✨

The Smithsonian's museums and zoo are now closed due to the government shut down. Tours of historic Washington, D.C. sites have been suspended and the National Gallery of Art is also closed.

For more information about the Friday night massacre at CDC, I wrote up an analysis of who got terminated and what that means for public health. Grateful to @saveamericamvmt.bsky.social for supporting and amplifying. We are in really terrible trouble. rasmussenretorts.substack.com/p/the-death-...

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what Tod said

New unified model of equatorial winds on giant planets helps to explain some of the zonal wind observations 🔭 I and my colleagues have made for Neptune and Uranus over the past few decades - www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🔭 Kudos to the Rubin team time.com/collections/...

Donation site for @mit.edu if you are so inclined: www.mit.edu/building-a-b... - I usually donate specifically to the fund for grad students named in honor of my mentor when I was an undergraduate there: the fund number for the James L. Elliot (1965) Graduate Student Support Fund is 3297565.

Gemini South finds Hayabusa2’s target asteroid is 3x tinier and spinning 2x faster than previously thought! #astronomy noirlab.edu/public/news/... Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/T. Santana-Ros ESO/M. Kornmesser. Asteroid: T. Santana-Ros et al. Hayabusa2 model: SuperTKG (CC-BY-SA)

My opinion piece on the pseudoscience of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis was published today by Skeptical Inquirer. skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/th...

Now on @sciam.bsky.social: NASA’s next-gen Habitable Worlds Observatory may be our best chance to find alien life. But can a nation busy ripping itself apart unite to launch a mission to solve life’s cosmic mysteries? By @nadiadrake.bsky.social (and me). www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-...

A recent vista from Mars obtained by the Perseverance Rover on its 1635th Martian day, or 'Sol', Clouds far above the eternal dust pall are unusually well shown in this afternoon view. This is a mosaic of two wide angle color Navcam images.

Position Statement: ACMT Supports the Safe Use of #Acetaminophen in Pregnancy. Read our full statement here➡️ bit.ly/3VxbKw8

"All that remained was to complete the crew capsule, called Orion, connected to SLS and to complete ground tests." 👀 Oh, that's "all"? Um . . . www.bbc.com/news/article...

If you think Tylenol is bad for children’s health what until you see what guns do.

I'll admit that Mars is not one of my favorite planets, but even I can't get enough Martian dune images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera, like this one colorized to look like the planet Uranus 😉 More stunning HiRISE pix at www.uahirise.org/catalog/

asteroid skymind - I am looking for a figure that shows asteroid spectral type as a function of near IR wavelength (0.9-2.5 micron) spectroscopy. Like this chart, but perhaps generalized and also with C and M type asteroids. Any leads? @asrivkin.bsky.social?

Cole Gregg explores whether interstellar material might come from circumstellar debris disks (it probably can!), and if so, where that material might come from and what would be the physical characteristics thereof #epscdps #epscdps2025

Leah Albrow's talk (given by John Forbes who stepped in to give it) planet dynamical instabilities leave their mark on the ISO population #EPSCDPS2025

John Forbes: according to a model based on stellar populations, our galaxy contains a tapestry of streams of interstellar objects (ISOs) as illustrated in this still from a video that has been shown repeatedly in this ISO session #epscdps #epscdps2025

Close encounters of the average kind: Yukon Huang explores an analytic model of interstellar objects are scattered out of their planetary systems #epscdps #epscdps2025

Have interstellar objects ever hit Earth? No confirmed instances based on fireball statistics but intriguing hints. Dusan Marčeta explores the possibilities with a simulation and it could happen! #epscdps #epscdps2025

Followed by Rosemary Dorsey who points out how hard it is to find these things: with @vrubinobs.bsky.social completeness of population will be less than a percent. arxiv.org/abs/2502.16741

Rosemary Dorsey reviews a simulation of the interstellar objects that NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory might reveal - how many, what their characteristics may be (maybe 6-51 objects - hard to detect!) @vrubinobs.bsky.social #epscdps #epscdps2025

Chris Lintott (@chrislintott.bsky.social) talking about the Ōtautahi-Oxford model - "know thy galaxy, know thy ISO" - ISOs outlive their parent stars, so we need the sine morte stellar population. #EPSCDPS2025

@chrislintott.bsky.social kicks off the “interstellar objects” session with an interesting discussion of how the orbits can link to potential sources of stellar populations, which gives us us context for their potential chemistry #epscdps2025 #epscdps

some interesting results from #JWST in the outer solar system in an absolutely packed room. Who put the session on the biggest, best new space telescope in the smallest room? 😅 #EPSCDPS #EPSCDPS2025.

"How do you think about this from a philosophical standpoint?" is a question that was just asked in the ice giant session. #epscdps2025

No notes for the next #espcdps2025 JWST session because I am chairing it. But there will be lots of great spectra for sure - from ultra faint TNOs to mainbelt asteroids, JWST gotchu 🔭

Mike Kelley describes spectra of the icy surface of comet Hale-Bopp, taken at a distance of 46 AU (!!) with JWST 🔭 : similar to Water-type TNOs but with organic features

Dark filaments in Jupiter’s atmosphere in JWST 🔭 images - Arrata Antuñano shows these are very dark at 3 microns, and move very fast relative to background atmosphere, suggesting they may at be very high altitude (but not as high as the ALMA data sense). Connected to ionosphere? Io footprint?

Pablo Rodriguez-Ovalle discusses using JWST 🔭 to study SL9 debris (still!) on Jupiter - HCN in particular. Possible polar depletion of HNC due to heterogeneous chemistry with polar aerosols? H20 enhanced near pole, but CO2 is not - auroral chemistry? More JWST data coming!