This should be visible across most of North America around 1pm local time (ish, very ish) today! Check the timing for where you are using Stellarium as described below, and then go outside and look up! It's really cool to be able to see celestial bodies moving relative to each other in real time […]

SCIENCE JOURNALISM AWARDS WINNER: Natasha Hill of Te Ao Maori News wins the Emerging science journalist award for her video story, which followed members of the Wairewa Rūnanga to Japan as they learned about how to help tuna/eels migrate.

New theoretical study of possible interiors of Uranus and Neptune, though the authors admit "magma" is a fraught term in this context (but props for ~correct colors to illustrate U&N outer atmospheres!) arxiv.org/abs/2606.18219 - my takeaway: we REALLY need a mission to one or both ice giants

We are hiring! Two Lecturer/Senior Lecturer (research+teaching) positions in the School of Maths & Stats, University of Canterbury ▶️One in Statistics, closes 15 July jobs.canterbury.ac.nz/jobdetails/a... ▶️One in Applied Maths, closes 21 July jobs.canterbury.ac.nz/jobdetails/a... Please share!

In a conference session hearing from study after study about the benefits of new RSV immunisation programs is both amazing and depressing. NZ has no funded general RSV immunisation: no maternal vaccination, infant immunisation has restrictive criteria, older adult vaccination is $$$

When utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.

Everyone: There aren't enough hours in the day! Asteroid 2022 GQ1: I'll give you almost 9 seconds arxiv.org/abs/2606.17047

This is an accumulation of exposures showing the number of satellites across the Milky Way during 35 minutes, from 12:28 am to 1:03 am on June 14, 2026. The field of view here is 54º by 37º, framing the Summer Triangle stars. Details in Alt Text.

Composite from 4 nights showing the relative positions of Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury. In the composite, Jupiter was held fixed while the others were allowed to shift. All images were taken from the same location at Lake Mary near Flagstaff, Arizona. #astrophotography #landscape 📷

I now realize that Κάτω on its own is 'down', 'under', as in the English words 'catatonic' and 'catastrophe'. So I am happy with katosphere, except for the possible confusion with 'catosphere', which we all know is the Internet.

Hopefully having a little sky time this weekend. I hope you get a double-dose of whatever heals you. Make it a triple.

At a time when NZ is desperately commissioning a billion dollar LNG terminal to avoid electricity shortages, it’s also signed off a 1GW AI data centre twice as power-hungry as Tiwai Point smelter. Jonathan Milne investigates.

Blossom morning #bloomscrolling

🔭 Comet R3 PanSTARRS Through Time Image Credit & Copyright: Jakub Kuřák & Martin Mašek (FZU of the Czech Academy of Sciences) ap260608

'Purple Rain' Earth's atmosphere revealed by a Himawari satellite study of water vapor in the infrared, an extended look at the turmoil in the water-filled skies of planet Earth. Each minute covers one day. Each shot covers one month. The 7h15m40s 4K video is not looped. youtu.be/bjvmUL_A20A

Every morning after the very-low-probability worst thing has happened is still a morning you have to get up

news.ucsc.edu/2026/06/blac... The press release is here! @blackinastro.bsky.social #BlackInAstro

Turns out the promo image is me, but I'm giving a public talk about what we can and can't see in the sky for Matariki Week in Christchurch... Monday July 6, 730 pm -- tickets are free! www.artscentre.org.nz/whats-on/pub...

The Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor — NASA’s first infrared space telescope purposely designed to discover potentially hazardous asteroids and comets — is undergoing integration and testing. www.ipac.caltech.edu/news/nasa-s-... 🧪 ⚛️ 🔭

Come work at @aucklanduni.bsky.social on space (hardware, or astrophysics, or both) -- assistant prof (US) / lecturer (UK/AU/NZ) jobs.smartrecruiters.com/TheUniversit...

I still think it is super cool to look at this and remember that you are looking across both space AND time. The travel time of the reflected sunlight from Jupiter is about ~50 mins. The travel time of the reflected sunlight from Venus now is ~10 mins.

Goddard clean room looking very empty as Nancy Grace Roman Space telescope leaves us ahead of schedule.

Folks, shaping up to be lovely night here in Tāmaki Makaurau -- look out to the western horizon where the sun has set, and spot Venus and Jupiter, two bright lights close together in the sky, and Mercury between them and the vanished sun. (Images as at 5:11 and 6:28)

Nearly three years of high quality of life. Immunotherapies + personalized cancer vaccine does seem hopeful

oh my god 😭

Uh Ōtautahi prunus, need winter first

What is the value of human beings studying the cosmos? For @michaelgreshko.bsky.social at Science, I dug into how practitioners of humanity's oldest exact science are metabolizing the latest developments in AI...and how it seems to be forcing them to wrestle with philosophical questions.

a quirk of killing the Marsden and replacing it with an MBIE-run fund is that MBIE caps the number of apps-per-university for their larger grants the Marsden was an even field: any academic could apply. if its replacement has caps, it further restricts our scientists' ability to fund their labs

On a telecon now for the MAVEN mission; NASA is officially ending efforts to contact the spacecraft and winding down the mission.

What do we mean by 'thick disk' and 'thin disk' when it comes to the Galactic origin of interstellar objects like 3I/ATLAS? Some musings from @astrohopkins.bsky.social, @chrislintott.bsky.social, @redshiftless.bsky.social and I ☄️🔭 iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...

Astrosky - come join me at UW and build the software that turns Rubin Observatory data into science! I'm not on the hiring committee but you can still AMA 🔭

Researchers and NZ science communicators- why not apply for these gongs, with ethical expert assessment committees? I treasure the one I was awarded a few years back.

Well, this was wild. The first Long March 12B rocket lifted off at 0840 UTC today from Dongfeng test zone at Jiuquan. No warning, and carrying Qianfan constellation satellites straight off the bat. Successfully reached orbit, but no recovery test today. mp.weixin.qq.com/s/3OfILgO9Zu...

This is absolutely astonishing - it's rare in astronomy to see so much change on a human timescale, but this really shows how dynamic the gas and dust around a young star can be. Seeing the shadows from the inner regions cast out onto the outer spiral arms, amazing!

🛑 Fireball Alert - USA 🇺🇸 🛑 A very bright daylight fireball ☄️ accompanied by a huge sonic boom was observed, heard and video recorded over Boston region, Massachussets, on May 30th, at 18h 06min UT (02:06pm, EDT). If you observed and/or recorded it, please share your observation: fireballs.imo.net

The pattern in the clouds is called a "Von Kármán vortex street". Their size is roughly 100 km. Very interestingly, the same pattern can be recreated at a much much smaller scale. Here they are, just a few centimeters across, visualized using a rheoscopic fluid: [2/2]

This is what the clouds around the Canary Islands look like at this moment. 🧪 [1/2]

"Someone, somewhere, has taken the decision to defund astrophysics research in the UK, but no-one seems quite sure who that was, or why." The latest on the impact of the catastrophic funding cuts to UK astrophysics, by me, in @natastron.nature.com 👩‍🔬🧪🔭 ✒️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A nice paper by @asborlaff.bsky.social showing that launching telescopes to space doesn't necessarily solve the light pollution issue from satellites. These are satellite trails seen by NASA's SPHEREx space telescope, which appear in 73% of all its images. Eek. arxiv.org/abs/2605.27501

Some happy news: 60% increase in invertebrates since removal of rats & mice🪲 from the island www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Amazing watching the recent rate at which Australia lent into this while NZ went 'suppose we should get around to that someday'

Listen in on scientists finding (and falling for) a new species of octopus now called Microeledone galapagensis. Read more here www.scientificamerican.com/article/tiny...

World maps including New Zealand (and work supported by a fundamental science grant @royalsocietynz.bsky.social )

Pretty excited by Wu et al.'s study (only out as a preprint) on potential iridescence in the tapejarid Sinopterus. Looks reasonable based on their data. If tajeparids are ecomorphological analogues of extant birds like hornbills (which I think they were), this is consistent with what we might guess.

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Bayesian:

sometimes I wonder if people in other fields have any clue what we go through as women in computational fields... (graph from: www.npr.org/sections/mon...)

How it started / how it’s going. [At the phenomenal Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta]

Chrysanthemum end game #bloomscrolling 🇳🇿🌱

Last of the autumn scarlet