I am not, as many people know, I am not a naturally optimistic or supportive person, but let me say that this is an impressive concept by some smart people that could do some real science. (More thoughts later when I’ve digested the paper.)

One nice piece of detective work for the Christmas morning shutter failure at Lick - staff astronomer Dr. Elinor Gates (with others) figured out exactly what time the shutter fell down. The first major clue: records from the seismometer in the building. There's a sharp red spike just after 3:16 AM.

Lick updates: We got a crane up there Friday and the winds dropped enough by Saturday to get the shutter off the roof.

In not-very-good news, extreme winds (114 mph gusts) on the early morning of the 25th caused significant damage to the 36" Great Refractor at Lick Observatory. Half of the main shutter broke off and landed on the main building.

I’m supportive of while mildly skeptical of the various fusion startups - most are smart and sincere but it’s a hard problem and after decades it’s unlikely there’s a easy solution - but nothing says “this is a complete scam” like merging with Trump social media. www.theguardian.com/media/2025/d...

Movie you’ve watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode (no Star Wars or Star Trek, LOTR, Marvel, Disney, or Pixar)

This suggests an obvious strategy for modifying Earth's climate cycles and delaying or hastening ice ages by destroying huge chunks of Mars with nuclear weapons or other techniques. I believe @theplanetaryguy.bsky.social would strongly support this.

This was inspired by the long-running (SF) Bay Area exoplanet meetings (originally organized by Tom Greene at Ames and still going strong.) It's a lovely format - local and informal with a good balance of elderly but supportive curmudgeons like me and @markmarley.bsky.social and young people.

Hey @nature.com, have you got an explanation for how the hell THIS happened? & especially why you accepted a paper with such a bizarre piece of genAI slop in it?! & more to the point, why we should take you seriously at all going forward? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Now I've heard there was a secret chord That yours truly played, and it pleased the Lord But you don't really care for music, do you? It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth The minor falls, the major lifts The pontifex composing Hallelujah

We should never, ever be assuming that just because our friends and colleagues are strong that they should have to take crap like is described in this thread, and it's our job to try and build a world where they don't have to.

Larry Summers needs to resign or be pushed out of Harvard. This is absolutely unacceptable.

I’m an economics professor and I approve this message. We have a deep bench of economists that are better qualified for this role.

Those were beautiful #aurorae in the past days. A solar storm brought a lot of protons to Earth. Not only to Earth but also to #ESAEuclid – but does #Euclid notice? Oh yes. www.euclid-ec.org/here-comes-t... #ESA #Sun #SpaceWeather #space

Astro PhD applications for Edinburgh are open! Deadlines are: * 24 Nov: Career Development Scholarship (for students of Black heritage) * 5 Dec: Bell Burnell Scholarship (for all URM students) * 5 Jan: all applications Come to beautiful Scotland! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Applying is free! 🔭🧪 ifa.roe.ac.uk/phds-jobs-fe...

This is a pretty darn important election here in California for an odd-numbered year. Get out there!

My #AO4ELT talk summarised the results from the new DM at @keckobservatory.bsky.social , and one of my favorite results is a video of applying a waffle on the DM. So here's my latest fun activities with the HAKA DM! HAKA: High Order Keck Adaptive Optics #astronomy #adaptiveoptics

Or in other units, this "donation" is $3 per service member per day. In addition to the illegality, presenting it as if it makes any difference whatsoever is nonsense.

For context, annual military compensation is about $600 billion. So $130 million is about $100 per service member or 0.02% of total annual costs. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/25/u...

I had my first real visit to @ucmerced.bsky.social to meet students and leaders and give a public talk, and had a wonderful time - hoping to come back some time soon.

Now with proper link! Inspiring people with science is a major part of UC Observatories' mission. We have an opening for a support astronomer at Lick Observatory to both support science and also to lead our amazing mountain-top public programming. aas.org/jobregister/...

Who robbed the Louvre? Right answers only.

SCIENCE POLICY NEWS: During Yom Kippur, all the members of the High Energy Physics Advisory Committee (HEPAP), myself included, received a letter thanking us for our service and telling us essentially that the almost 40 yo standing federal advisory committee was no more. ⚛️🧪🔭 Why that matters 🧵

Loeb says: “Not aliens.”

My hotel room in Brussels is quite something.

I'm running a Blades In the Dark RPG session tomorrow for @debbieohi.com @wjrucklidge.bsky.social @aiabx.bsky.social @drbrake.bsky.social and after a long week with limited brain space for creativity I'm just going to set the damn thing at an American Astronomical Society meeting.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin ✨ figured out what stars are made of ✨ when she was just 25. 🔭🧪 Her PhD thesis basically established the Harvard astro department — at a time when Harvard didn't officially allow woman students. I wrote this little profile to mark the 100th anniversary of her thesis:

"Many of the LG employees arrested were on business trips with various visas or under a visa waiver programme" This seems worrying for scientific collaboration. Will ICE decide that people coming to give colloquia, or use a telescope, on visa-waiver are "working"? www.bbc.com/news/article...

Today I did Actual Math and solved a problem with nonlinear least-squares. To be fair, it was an accounting problem and the optimization was in Excel but I'm still going to call this a win.

"Like Monarez, O’Neill is not a physician" is a fascinating sentence. It seems like it might be relevant that Susan Monarez has a PhD (dissertation: "Macrophage regulation by trypanosome GIP-SVSG during trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense infection ") while Jim O'Neill is a venture capitalist with an MA.

Full resignation letter from Demetre C. Daskalakis, a CDC leader, does not hold back. "The recent shooting at CDC is not why I am resigning. My grandfather, who I am named after, stood up to fascist forces in Greece and lost his life doing so. I am resigning to make him and his legacy proud."

Very nice result, and I'd also like to highlight Ryan Foley's excellent quote at the end - "Foley said the funding situation and outlook for continued support is very uncertain, forcing the collaboration to take fewer risks, resulting in decreased science output overall. "

Today our team released findings on the nature of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, based on our first round of JWST observations. The data are incredible: Not only did we detect and map gas and dust in the coma, but we found that 3I is one of the most CO2 rich comets ever seen! Check it out:

"Twenty-three Democratic attorneys general now gather on near-daily Zoom calls at 8 AM Pacific, which means the East Coast officials are already on their third coffee. They divide responsibilities and share templates for lawsuits they’ve been drafting since last spring."

This is absolutely the way I feel pretty much every day.

The amount of research I do for each project depends on the project. I also enjoy doing deep-dives into obscure stuff. In blackboard equations for I'M WORRIED, for example, I added Bayes Theorem after consulting w/ my friend @bmacastro.bsky.social (relates to what Flamingo & Potato were discussing)

One of those days when stock market investors who haven't developed object permanence rediscover to their amazement that the tariffs are still there because daddy opened his hands again and said "peek-a-boo!"

Now we have Nicole Wolff talking about impacts of correlated noise on retrievals of exo-Earth atmospheres. Direct images contain chromatic speckles that move radially outward with wavelength. They are a source of spectrally correlated noise coupling adjacent wavelength bins. #HWO25

@bmacastro.bsky.social talking at #HWO2025, saying he's neither inspiring (not true) nor optimistic (maybe true) and that he thinks we can really find habitable worlds with HWO. When he started out, factors of millions between imaging capability and the needs for finding Earths #exoplanets #astrosci

Now we have Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social introducing us to the power of directly imaging exoplanets. Unfortunately it's like trying to spot a single bioluminescent algae next to a lighthouse (more accurate contrast than the oft-quoted firely, apparently!) #HWO25

Senate CJS bill is passed out of committee, with strong support for NASA and NSF (basically flat budgets) and strongly supportive language for many facilities. www.appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/do...

Given the mass and separation distribution of other satellites in the solar system the probability of the Moon existing is <10^-2, so it clearly must be alien technology.

From a source: "DOE and NSF have jointly decided that they can no longer support the CMB-S4 Project." CMB-S4 was one of the top priorities of the P5 report. Last May NSF had already announced its intent to pull back from the mission; there was hope DOE would continue with just the Chilean site.

Marketplace is one of the very best public radio programs right now, in part because of @kairyssdal.bsky.social 's willingness to actually use the world "lie" when Trump administration people, well, lie, about objective facts. I'd support them even without the cool hat.

I've visited this building for reviews or policy meetings, and it was quietly inspiring to walk through halls with the black hole images from the Event Horizon Telescope, or the LIGO echos of black holes, and see incredibly hard working staff. Depressing as hell that they're getting kicked out.

The other half of this: *you* need to become the person in the room fighting for people who aren’t there.

Beautiful new results from my @stsci.edu colleagues Kielan Hoch and collaborators (on here: @mattkenworthy.bsky.social, @offallingstars.bsky.social , @bmacastro.bsky.social , @balmer.bsky.social) with JWST + MIRI www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

I grew up in Kingston - it’s a lovely city - and Queen’s is a pretty damn good university that is doing something morally good, self-beneficial, and brilliantly trolling here. A perfect trifecta

Everyone of the brilliant people in this picture has spent their life trying to enable humanity to discover new things, and they were forced to sneak out to take the picture celebrating their organizations 75th anniversary next to a parking lot.