loooooooove this

terrified to catch-up on bluesky after not opening the app for >2 weeks

Peak wind gust measured so far by the weather station at Burke-Gaffney Observatory (at ~90m elevation) is 127 km/hr! Windy windy windy #nswx

Y’all the wind whipping through the slow-moving MacDonald bridge traffic while sitting in this bus is worse than having just spent 45 minutes sitting on Gottigen Rd in this bus. #Halisky #nswx

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

Rainbow from the Burke-Gaffney Observatory east-facing webcam over Halifax right now

Y'all... Once again, Toronto gets the special Jonas Brothers events. Being the large Canadian city, it *feels* like Toronto is "nearby" and should be like a place for "hometown shows" but then reality of having to travel with a weeks' notice across Canada in December sets in...

omg that moonrise 🤯🥹

Moon's up 🌕

Moon's up

tw: loss / mc the universe has a dark sense of humour bc i cried with the dental hygienist about my miscarriage in my appt today and when i left, there was a huge advert in the elevator for a private ultrasound clinic complete with in-utero baby photos!!!!!! 🥲 i should have taken the stairs lol

Moon's up

Just a heads-up if you're looking for a telescope for the holidays... Costco has telescopes again, and they're decent 'scopes. I got one for myself a couple yrs ago that I use at home. 🔭 (It is the time of the year where I'm getting emails wondering how/what/where to get a telescope for Xmas)

As I have said to students nowadays, the most important thing one learns in school is how to learn, and using LLMs completely defeats that objective. The process matters. You don't use a fork lift the gym. The immediate result—weights up in the air—is not always the key reason to do something.

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick. Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.

yeah I might have a million other things to do but maybe I’ll spend the evening making a 2026 F1 calendar to print because I can’t find one on Etsy that I like

pop culture thoughts this week: one "oh no I didn't want to feel that" to Kelsea Ballerini's "I Sit In Parks" a "this is exactly what it should be and what I wanted to feel (positive)" to A Very Jonas Christmas Movie and finally an extremely frustrated facepalm for the series All Her Fault

Wow! The Burke-Gaffney Observatory all-sky camera @smuhalifax.bsky.social captured the brief surge in aurora last night when the sky lit up RED by-eye. The camera is black & white, but we can see the band of aurora start in the north (bottom) and work its way southward, before the clouds took over 🤯

if you're wondering if you totally missed out last night, know that there's a possibility of another night of decent aurora chances *tonight* (night of Nov 12) if you can find clear skies

CAN'T BELIEVE THE SKY TURNED NAKED EYE RED AND THE CLOUDS STAYED AWAY UNTIL IT FADED OH MY GOD #Halisky ok I'm going to bed now

Can't believe I'm standing in my driveway under street lights in Dartmouth seeing this #Halisky

Perhaps one of the best things about aurora photos is everyone has a different view of it, and so all the images are unique and, to me, that makes them all amazing. It also feels like aurora sort of flattens the otherwise steep astrophotography curve.

IT'S VISIBLE FROM MY FRONT PORCH IN DARTMOUTH RIGHT NOW!!!!!!

The Northern Lights over #Chicago with an iPhone. What a world. #aurora

clouds are starting to slowly break up around Halifax and I may have found the will to live again. will go out aurora chasing soon 🙏

Here is the current view from Imperial, CA looing north! This is literally mere miles from the U.S./Mexico border. ALL U.S. STATES (possibly excluding Hawaii) CAN SEE AURORA RIGHT NOW if clear! theauroraguy.com/pages/webcams

My family in IL saw aurora towards the north horizon on their phone cameras in the middle of the city just now (and we're fully clouded over in Halifax...) If you have clear dark skies tonight.... Check for aurora in the sky!!!!

heads-up potential for aurora over the next couple of nights, maybe

These annual lectures in astronomy at SMU are always so interesting. They're for everyone, which means you do not need to be an "expert" by any means to enjoy and understand them! Tickets are free on Eventbrite - come join! Anyone interested in astronomy or space stuff will enjoy it. #Halisky ✨

in case anyone is keeping track, tonight is clear but too windy to open the Observatory dome on the roof of the 24 storey building and I've had a terrible day anyway so I'm not stressing about starting a work project at 9pm tbh

ok i've fixed a number of things at the Observatory, i just need some clear skies to test some things out, and, uh, well, ok,

Did you know the colour of an LED is dependent on the band gap of the doped semiconductor inside? And that that band gap is temperature dependent? And! If you (gently) dunk said LED in liqN2, neat things happen! #iTeachPhysics

and my hot take that daylight time is wayyyy better* than standard time *your own opinion will depend on your location (east/west) within your time zone and your daily habits

your reminder we are currently in *standard time* now with earlier sunrises and sunsets

Will Smith hit a homer off Bieber is a sentence I wouldn’t have understand before this playoff run

me nine innings ago / me now

this is the sorta thing I'm used to seeing happen at Wrigley with a ball getting caught in the vines in the outfield but THIS is truly silly

yes darth. we get this question a lot. i usually tell them about the retroreflectors on the moon. we shine lasers at the reflectors left by the apollo astronauts to measure how far away the moon is! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_L...

i unfortunately get this about once a month. last time, it was from a ~7-year-old sitting in a classroom with their parents more common questions are - what if we put a camera on a string and send it in black hole??? - do you believe in aliens?? - are we going to die if [thing] happens???

After the Cubs were eliminated earlier this month, I became a Blue Jays Bandwagon-er with all the rest of Canada. An incredible post-doc in the astro/phys dept made this Blue Jay costume last night(!!) and its perfect, esp with tonight's Game 6/Halloween combo. Go Jays! Baseball! Sports! 🐦⚾

Rethinking spending time going up and down to the 24th floor at work today...

I took all three dogs on walks tonight (separately, of course) and cleared out all of the storm drains I saw along the way! There's still time to take a short walk around where you're at and clear out the leaves! #NSStorm

It was a bad morning to try to commute from Dartmouth to the Halifax peninsula with this happening off the MacDonald bridge and multiple accidents on the Circ on the way to the MacKay bridge (which was backed up to MAIN STREET!!!!) 😵‍💫

Let's all just take a second to appreciate this oscillating drop of liquid nitrogen. Ok? Is that too much to ask?

Moon's up

I have bad news: the time change is this Sunday, Nov 2 ("fall back" 1 hr). Whether you prefer later sunsets or earlier sunrises in the winter, just know that we are *ending* daylight saving time this weekend and *returning to* standard time for the winter. Please phrase your arguments accordingly.

had more than one person message me that the Jonas Brothers were on TV. I am correctly known as the Jonas Brothers Person 🙏 (also, I knew, I knew)

Also MY NEIGHBOUR is here, also presenting! We could have carpooled! 🫣

Oh, hey! I’m still on strike as a CUPE Part-Time professor at SMU. Here’s a fun little graphic: according to Maclean’s Magazine, SMU is ranked #3 in Canada for small universities. How does the PT pay for faculty compare across the top 10 schools? Oh. Oh dear.