We have a #MinCup25 champion!! Congratulations, #Kyanite! www.mineralcup.org/2025 After eight years of competing, another few hours to verify votes was nothing, right? Amazing first run, #Tugtupite, and better luck next year.

It knocked out some of my favorites, but I've come around and think #tugtupite should win it all! #MinCup25

#MinCup25 Final: After a month of learning and laughter, we’re at the final match to determine the 2025 Mineral Cup Champion! We have blue blades of #kyanite up against optical magician #tugtupite. Vote: www.mineralcup.org/2025/vote/r5... Results: www.mineralcup.org/2025/results...

What have I done

#kosmochlor ftw, it was found in a meteorite deposit and is literally named after space

I made a plea for perovskite at Astronomy on Tap because apparently brown dwarfs rain #perovskite. Guess it's working? #AoT #MinCup25

These are pictures of brown dwarf stars. You know what they’re also pictures of? #Perovskite, which rains down in their atmospheres. How cool is that? Very, very cool indeed! Vote for brown dwarf rain. Vote Perovskite! #MinCup25 Vote: www.mineralcup.org/2025/vote/r3...

#MinCup25 yall should vote for #taenite so it can go against #kosmochlor in the quarter finals and we can decide which is the top meteorite mineral

Ya know those silly mobile game ads where your number of troops or whatever are changed by running through some basic math equations? I could see that actually being kinda fun if it was a bunch of super obscure or weird math functions instead of "5+5 or 5x5?"

#MinCup25 Cool structure, fun name, pretty color, and it's a Uranium mineral? #paddlewheelite should win 100%

#kosmochlor ftw, it was found in a meteorite deposit and is literally named after space

Ok, part 2. I know the vote is long over and #pollucite lost miserably, but I want to finish what I started! So this will be a quick thread on some fun etymology and astrophysics. #MinCup25

Ok, just for fun, thread on #pollucite for #MinCup25. I am interested in it because of a possible use in nuclear safety and some fun naming connections to astrophysics. So here is part 1!

Kinda want to write up a fun little thread on #pollucite for #MinCup25 because I went down a few rabbit holes on related nuclear physics and some etymology. Maybe while I'm waiting around the airport later.

Using synthetic pollucite as a radiocesium storage medium is a neat little trick

👀👀👀👀 Super neat preprint! 📡🔭 A rare, hot-Jupiter exoplanet orbits the pulsar PSR J2322-2650. Astronomers used #JWST to observe it across the full orbit, and found its atmosphere rich in carbon AND it having a strong westward wind! 🤯 ping: @aussiastronomer.bsky.social! arxiv.org/abs/2509.04558

Banning trans people from owning guns is a really REALLY significant escalation and I think the scariest part about it that's not being discussed at all is that the plan is to declare that trans people are mentally ill Moreover, ICE must be destroyed edition.cnn.com/2025/09/04/p...

Found out earlier I will be going to Jackson, Mississippi for work and ever since I have had Uptown Funk stuck in my head

why were there like 10 different conventions going on this weekend LOL hope you guys had fun aarawrrarf

Holy fuck that’s the actual Image! In my lifetime we have gone from: “other stars probably have planets” to “We are directly imaging baby planets in young stellar systems.” We could do more of this instead of the fascism and genocide.

Well I, an astronomer, can obviously think of no downsides to a company promising to launch a constellation of reflective mirrors into low-Earth orbit to increase daylight for folks on the ground.

Poking at my art tablet for the first time in months to make some patches for VTOL VR

Look at this commission I got by the wonderful @theroguez.bsky.social! :3

There is an episode of Behind the Bastards with the @knowledgefight.bsky.social hosts where one of them does an impression of Alex Jones saying, "I can't count that high!" Sometimes when I'm required to do math in my head, I will just blurt that out lol

Cosmic microwave background radiation

Cosmic microwave background

The cosmic microwave background radiation

and on here! coyotictrouble.etsy.com/listing/4335...

Ohmygod, look at him go 🥹

Got damn

1/n 🧵 Just released: NEW images of Phobos over Mars by @esa.int Mars Express 🔭🧪 This view shows Phobos above Olympus Mons! Full-size (130MP) image & details: flic.kr/p/2rggHKy Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/Andrea Luck CC BY Captured on May 14, 2025 | Image ID: HQ967 Raw data from: psa.esa.int

dog in low orbit

I got the job! So hopefully soon I can find a place and start moving over to the city of weird :3

I still have no idea why the US hasn't done something comparable in Cascadia and at least eastern Alaska yet. There's perpetually talk and plans and tests, but very few instruments actually installed.

Personally, I view it as a major crisis in scientific integrity that a racist blogger can maintain access to a dataset of minors involved in a study to understand health and disease so he can do whatever harebrained pseudoscience he wants to show Black people are biologically inferior

This is exactly what the internet is for.

Yep!

It is simultaneously extremely exciting and - for worldbuilding purposes -slightly annoying that we're right up at the point where we can plausibly start definitively answering the question of "what planets orbit Alpha Centauri A and B?" Real Soon Now...

exosphere

Scablands appreciation post

I've gone from "my New York friends seem happy, everyone's very optimistic, that's nice". to "this guy's face would screenprint well onto the flag of a militia"

UPDATE ON INTERSTELLAR COMET #A11pl3Z: It's OFFICIALLY LABELED 3I/ATLAS by the Minor Planet Center!!! minorplanetcenter.net/mpec/K25/K25... HUGE thank you to all the astronomers for confirming this object! The next step now is someone getting the big scopes (Hubble, JWST, etc.) to look at it! ☄️🔭🧪

I cannot articulate to you how damaging this will be to NASA science and to the scientific leadership of the United States generally. To say nothing of the precedence of the White House and NASA leadership simply ignoring Congress. arstechnica.com/space/2025/0...

I miss being around scientists most of the time :/

I keep getting an ad for IBM where some ai "researcher" or exec is suggesting new college students use their ai "assistants" for health care advice. That shit is so reckless I cannot believe it is being pushed willy nilly.

Was working on something else, but got bitten by this idea and it just wouldn't go away until it was painted. So uhhhhh moths 🦋