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!

Not interested in super moons, micro moons or blue moons. They basically are all full moons and are either identical to or only marginally different from regular full moons. The main function of defining these various full moons is to provide filler content for 21st century media.

I'm not usually That Guy but a compass is not enough for ship navigation. There is a very good book about that. xkcd.com/3251/

Experimenting with expanding the inner Milky Way visualization to add the nearest spiral arm to the Sun. Obviously needs a lot of work still!

I have updated the Sub-Neptune article on #Wikipedia! Honestly long overdue, but better than never. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-Nep...

I'm giving a public webinar on "10 things you might not know about the Milky Way", on 22nd June. Sign up below! It will be of interest to anyone who's interested in space. Particularly, schoolchildren who might apply to University of Leicester (or their parents)! 🔭🎢

At #CAP2026 in Yerevan, Dr. Susanne Hoffmann, Chair of the IAU Working Group on Star Names (#WGSN), presented a summary of the group’s 10 years of activities on official star names. M. Sadegh Faghanpour also presented the group’s outreach and communication activities. #IAU #Astronomy

Last time I checked, many exoplanet papers were using broken 2MASS and WISE catalog names that someone chose because they were "shorter". Personally I don't care if you call an exoplanet "George" in your paper so long as you first reference a *real* catalog name (in a SIMBAD-approved format).

Gaia DR4 exoplanets! arxiv.org/abs/2605.23018

Here's another attempt to visualize the inner Milky Way by cutting and pasting bits of NGC 5335 and NGC 1512. Not great but I am still working on my skills in combining features from other galaxies.

Looking at galaxies with complicated inner regions for inspiration. overlookhorizon.com/spiral-galax...

At lunch time I play VR golf (Golf+) two or three times a week with my 87-year-old father who lives across the pond in Canada. Not only did he just beat me by 5 strokes, but he got an eagle on a hole in TPC Sawgrass. Age obviously hasn't affected his (virtual) golf game.

Here is an image of the entire inner galaxy using a slightly different Hi-GAL density map weighted by the mass of the clumps. As before, the green ellipse is the location of the bar and the cyan dots are the masers. I am defining the inner galaxy as roughly the region within the corotation region.

NGC 7773. Another beautiful barred spiral galaxy that might look a little like our Milky Way. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_7773

The Iris Nebula in constellation Cepheus is illuminated by the blueish light of its central star. Just as a lotus is rooted in mud, the Iris is surrounded by brownish soot nebulae. This #astrophotography was taken over 8h with my @celestronuniverse.bsky.social Origin from a light-polluted suburb.

My current theme song. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWxJ...

I'm flat-out amazed that we can monitor the currents of molten metal in Earth's outer core, 2200 kilometers underground--but we can. Lately, part of that flow has reversed direction, for reasons unknown. There's a whole other dynamic world inside the world we see. 🧪🔭 www.esa.int/Applications...

the world needs more guinea pig cartographers

Spiral arm names are surprisingly confusing, even for professional astronomers. I recently encountered this in a 2023 paper about spiral structure that uses the term "Norma" arm for what most astronomers call the "Scutum-Centaurus" arm. ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023ApJ....

I was in Middelburg, Netherlands where it is *usually* agreed that the telescope was invented and I visited a local museum with some of the oldest telescopes. The first evidence we have about telescopes is an unresolved patent dispute. I don't think any one knows who first built a telescope.

So here's part of my weekend work on mapping the inner galaxy. My question: can I find the inner ring that wraps around the bar described in this paper: ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022A%26... in Hi-GAL and masers? Answer: maybe? Green ellipse is bar and white ellipse is ring. Cyan dots: masers.

The UK keeps trying to get the advantages of the EU without any of the responsibilities and the EU keeps rejecting it. What is the point of this political game? www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

I was reading a recent paper proposing a Milky Way inner ring (ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022A%26...) and I realized that it was using a novel galactic orientation that rotated the bar to a horizontal position so the galactic centre was not up, down, left or right. Instead ... upper right?

Made a view of FU Orionis with Spitzer and WISE data. No particular reason other than an interest in FU Orionis after reading the name in the Star Formation Newsletter. As always, more to read at the Flickr page: flic.kr/p/2sdQhtR

This weekend I'll be trying my first stab at creating a map of the inner galaxy. My early trial runs have looked promising.

There is a lot of hype on the Erdős unit distance problem solution. I'm not a professional mathematician but my degree is in pure mathematics so I feel like I have a stake in this. There are an infinite number of possible mathematical problems and only a small number of mathematicians so ...

VR museums like this are popping up all over the place. I'm working on a starship experience that will showcase Gaia DR4 and will be available early next year. I'm hoping that some of these Location Based Experiences (LBE) will be interested. www.amsterdamnow.com/en/culture/e...

As I prepare for working on an atlas of the Milky Way, one issue bothers me: if the Milky Way has an inner ring surrounding the bar, then the usual spiral structure of the inner galaxy as displayed in dozens of papers must be wrong as at least two "spiral segments" must be associated with the ring.

This week I have been looking at Hi-GAL, ATLASGAL and the latest release of the WISE HII regions. All these data sets go out to 20 kpc and they are all consistent. So are the masers, although only one or two of these have been mapped in the fourth quadrant and they don't go out as far.

Given that there is often a 30 year gap between research and a Nobel prize I think that this article is pure AI hype. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Always exciting to hear about progress in detecting exoplanets! The Gaia Mission may detect up to 70 thousand exoplanets by its final data release around 2030. And the first preliminary Gaia exoplanet catalog will be arriving on 2 December this year.

My galaxy orientation poll is over. Right, down and up got almost equal votes. Interesting.

I'm looking for the Hi-GAL 360 degree Catalogue of Clump Physical Properties as described here: ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021MNRA... I just want the catalog - no need for search forms. Oddly, it does not seem to be available from Vizier or any other convenient location. Any advice?

I've heard of less than half of these and actually read less than 10. Is reading literature now a specialist endeavour like mountain climbing for an elite group that takes a lot of time and special training? www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int...

While getting ready for Gaia DR4, I made density maps out to 20 kpc for the compact clumps in HI-GAL and ATLASGAL. These data sets have velocity-derived distances so normally a little dubious but it was exciting so see how closely the structures in the first quadrant matched the masers. But ...

I've been lucky enough to be invited to be a co-author on a few papers and the lead author always waited for the paper to be accepted before uploading it to arXiv. I assumed that was standard practice.

What is your favorite galactic map orientation? mastodon.social/@galaxy_map/...

Przybylski’s Star may be the strangest object we've yet observed. Is it a technosignature? Very short-lived ultra-heavy elements like actinium, plutonium show up here. How? What is making these reactions on a stellar surface? Sagan had a thought on this. www.centauri-dreams.org/2026/05/15/p...

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

The pressures on boys have always existed and many drop out as they always have because school is deliberately not designed for a large part of the population. The real issue is that girls are more successful than they once were. And that is not a problem! www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

While it has been unused for nearly three decades, it's still sad to see the McLaughlin Planetarium go. 🔭 www.blogto.com/real-estate-...

I had to look up what a TTRPG was so I am obviously not in the target audience.

Canada has a similar problem. Nuts that both countries still have first-past-the-post and members of parliament can take office with the backing of only a quarter of their electorate. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Here we go! Gaia DR4 now has an official release date: 2 December 2026. If you have been following the Gaia Mission closely, you will know that DR4 has had a sliding release date, from the end of 2025, to mid 2026 to "end of 2026". But now the date is locked. www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dat...

Loading datasets on-the-fly in #GaiaSky just got easier: We've added a new "Installed Datasets" tab to the load dialog, allowing you to quickly jump into your library without browsing folders. The classic file picker is still there for your custom .vot, .csv, and .fits files. Watch below! 🎬

more about those exoplanet surface composition results from #JWST & MIRI! 🔭

Not just any nebula. This HII region is the most visible part of the sphere of ionized gas that surrounds the CMa OB1 hot star association, an important part of the local galaxy.

First Contact. Star Trek vs. Project Hail Mary (has spoilers). Went to see Project Hail Mary yesterday. Like Star Trek, Project Hail Mary has an optimistic story about humans cooperating with aliens to achieve common goals. But the differences are interesting.

With the interesting details on this red clump map (and not just about the bar) and the much lower errors expected for Gaia DR4 astrometry and photometry, will 2026 finally be the year we can map out detailed spiral structure in the Milky Way?