Gruyère stuffed cheesy bread for Easter Sunday brunch #OmNomNom

The Integrity spacecraft just entered the lunar gravitational sphere of influence, at 0438 UTC Apr 6. Wiseman, Glover, Koch and Hansen are now the 25th to 28th humans to have left terrestrial space.

It's frequently pointed out that NASA activities (and basic/exploratory science in general) have a fantastic return on investment, contributing far more to the economy than they take. But even if they didn't, no one's actually taking from the "cure sick people" pot to put money in the "rockets" pot.

Amateur astronomers with telescopes equipped with video cameras are requested to look for impact flashes on the Moon tonight, to coordinate with #ArtemisII observations. Details here: www.geodes.umd.edu/impactflash

"The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It [cannot] anticipat[e] any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with." — Ada Lovelace, 1843

This post almost perfectly summaries my worries about AI in academia. Well worth your time.

Can’t open windows in space!

hi @rami.spaceaustralia.com did you make a final version of your pulsar map? I was interested in seeing what you ended up with!

Oh wow. Just.... wow. Lemon level eyerolling here.

This is an awesome explainer for the Arecibo transmission

Don't give them ideas... xkcd.com/3225/

Reflect Orbital finally have some numbers for their underwhelming service. 50 Watts per square metre for 20 minutes* in 2030 if they launch 5000+ satellites. This requires 750 satellites and if they charge $5000 per satellite per hour then this will cost just $750,000. www.reflectorbital.com

I've submitted a reply to the FCC regarding the response by Reflect Orbital to comments from the public and organisations on their crazy space mirror project. My critique is they want to launch a pathfinder for an infeasible project and they haven't properly addressed the risk of eye damage.

For all the coronagraph fans out there: I'm pleased to share our paper (led by @mattkenworthy.bsky.social) on the design & performance of the Apodizing Phase Plate coronagraph for the ERIS instrument at the Very Large Telescope + our recommendations for using it to study exoplanets & brown dwarfs 🪐🔭

If you haven’t seen 3Blue1Brown videos yet, you are missing out! His latest one is on M.C. Escher’s picture frame distortion is absolutely breathtaking, using visuals to introduce complex analysis in what feels a very intuitive way. All his videos are excellent and well worth a browse.

I have a fondness for "faff around" which is to do anything but the thing you should be doing right now.

Delighted to see our WISPIT team announce the second directly imaged exoplanet from the WISPIT 2 system! Led by Chloe Lawlor (Galway) with Richelle van Capelleveen (Leiden), we also have a spectrum of the inner, more massive planet, showing carbon monoxide features. ☄ #exoplanet #astrodon

Started watching it but I can't work out if ALL of them have had some 'work' done or not... they all look a bit too young to me and they're all somewhere in Uncanny Valley.

I would tell an exomoon joke, but there's no compelling evidence for one.

I'm involved with most of these panels and I feel seen.

0 for 7 with JWST exoplanet direct imaging proposals, sheesh. This after the ESO fiasco, this is going to be a tough year observation-wise.

This is amazing work, especially in dealing with the systematics. Definitely something I'll be looking at from now on.

"ELTI": a concept for using the Extremely Large Telescope as an optical interferometer. Enabled by advances in single-photon AD detector arrays, segmented sub-pupil beam combination and high-R spectroscopy. arxiv.org/abs/2603.05589 Yesss LFG 🔭 🔭 🔭

Absolutely amazing that it landed on that paper bag, too

*Victorian England local mean times entered the chat*

New NICER neutron star results this morning, led by Yves Kini! For the first rotation-powered millisecond pulsar we ever reported on, PSR J0030+0451. More data (6 years!), background constraints fully incorporated, and improved sampling. #highenergyastro 🔭🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2602.23743

I really love the new YouTube “you’re not a bot” sign in page, because when I click to watch a video this dialog pops up and I ask myself “Do I really need to watch this video?” and the answer is almost always “No I don’t” and I go do something more productive/useful instead. #lifehack

Huh. Weird. My Visles keyboard and/or Mac OSX decided to spontaneously swap the Option and Command keys on me. This led to a few puzzling minutes wondering if my keyboard had broken…

Beautiful work! I really love the paper calculators that were produced before mechanical computers. The number of nomograms produced was also amazing.

Since yesterday, the Einstein AI cheatbot website underwent some rebranding. The tagline changed from "Einstein does the busywork so you don't have to," to "Einstein is the personal tutor every student deserves." In the FAQ, "How does Einstein do all this?" became "How does Einstein help me learn?"

The FCC just opened public comments on SpaceX's plan to launch a million satellites to do AI compute in space. Under the current proposal, an environmental review won't be required. Please consider submitting a public comment to oppose this damaging plan. darksky.org/news/two-sat...

This paper gets into the ballpark but not the ludicrous numbers discussed above. Reflect Orbital particularly concerns me given its many large satellites with (at a particular angle) a surface brightness comparable to the Sun. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It’s taken me a couple of days to work out where I’ve seen that look before, then as I was watching “The Exorcist” the answer came to me in a flash….

Also, this is maddening. The authors could have *asked* why even zero-profit-margin journals is the AAS Journals cost so much to produce. No need to imagine! There's a lot more to producing a real, archived, edited, typeset, scientific article with data than peer reviewer labor.

Every time I see people complain about doing peer review “for free” for community journals I lose my mind further. If you’re a salaried academic this is your job! The money would come from the community anyway in these journals! In every industry people fought to convert piecework to wage or salary!

And before anyone gets mad in the replies - I said community journals! Elsevier journals can go jump in the lake, etc. But we’re lucky in astronomy that ApJ/PASA/MNRAS/A&A are the main venues anyway and we don’t have a plague of the parasite journals. We need to support them and keep it that way!

And before, etc - love OJA and let’s keep that going

Always nice to see our group's discoveries make the rounds :) kenworthy.space/projects/yses/

Hello HARPS3! Are you ready for some optics? OK then ... let the optical installation begin!⭐

LLMs do not understand, will not understand, and cannot ever understand information. It's a glorified search engine combined with auto-compete, and you should treat it as such. No matter how much LLM companies try to tell you their machines can think or reason, they cannot and will not. 12/12

“Don’t blink. Don’t even blink”: Arima+ on “An optical transient candidate of ≲ 2-second duration captured by wide-field video observations” where they look up into the Earth’s shadow to capture these very fleeting events. I’m not sure of their interpretation, but it’s fascinating. #astrodon ☄

Threads was an initially inconspicuous made for TV film about nuclear war's impact on real people. The film plays out in excruciating, accurate detail how awful it would be for every single human affected. It is the best illustration of the horrors and human cost of nuclear war that I am aware of.

I hate the modern need to remake everything. Threads was the most harrowing thing I have ever watched and it will stay with me forever. Nuclear war is NOT a subject matter that needs 'hope' and the original executed that perfectly.

I'm reading the paper and mulling over it... definitely worth your time to take a look!

Oh now this is VERY cool! Denis+ on “Cold and eccentric: a high-spectral resolution view of 51 Eri b with VLT/HiRISE” where radial velocity measurements of the exoplanet enable a determination of the 3D orbit, and therefore you can calculate the PHASE as seen by Earth! #astrodon #exoplanet ☄

(Settles in rocking chair, grumbling and muttering and rubbing a sore knee joint) Last week we had the sixth installment of the Spirit of Lyot conference series hosted in Pasadena, focused on direct imaging of exoplanets and high contrast instrumentation. It was an excellent conference. /1

Very interesting paper by Blunt+ on “Evidence for a Peak at ~0.3 in the Eccentricity Distribution of Typical Super-Jovian Exoplanets” showing this e for planets between 0.1 and 4.5 au. Giant impacts, scattering with super-Jovians? #exoplanets #astrodon #astrosci @blunt-comma-s.bsky.social

Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin’s autobiography is just amazing. Every astronomer should read it. Here she is talking about her memories of Annie Jump Cannon.

My textbook on SETI is published! I hope you like it! Please see if your libraries offer a free download—mine does! iopscience.iop.org/book/mono/97... 🧪🔭

xfig never left...