Landed in London. There was a CRAZY aurora outside on the flight over, I've never seen anything like it! Absolutely surreal...

Tonight's aurora from Antwerpen, Belgium! quite rare spectacle. Started out very green, then pink-purple before it subsided just like an hour ago. 🧪 🔭

If I was Mr/Madame Nobel Peace Prize Committee, I would simply not have awarded it to the far-right woman who was already cheerleading the far-right paedophile president to bomb her own people.

Orion, out of focus. You can see the stars' color better this way. Betelgeuse on the lower left is a red supergiant, and on the top right is Rigel, a blue supergiant. The three stars in the belt, bluer, are hotter. The color follows from the temperature according to the Wien's displacement law. 🧪 🔭

1 PhD in planetary astro vs. a dude & his AI 🥴

Bandcamp has banned AI music. The company has released a statement which includes the following: "Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp." stereogum.com/2485199/band...

Our website for the British Planetary Society Conference 2026 is now live! 📅 9-11 June, 2026 🎯 St Andrews, Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Our website contains details on how to get to St Andrews and the conference accommodation. Registration details will be added soon. bpsc2026.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk

The #EGU2026 meeting in Vienna is coming soon! Here are two sessions that I believe are of interest to planetary scientists: www.egu26.eu/session/55682 www.egu26.eu/session/55874 Submit your abstract, deadline is tomorrow! 🧪 🔭

I guess you've seen the coop.planetary-research.org as well, Andy?

Anyone know the mechanism for these curves forming? Ice crystal lines seeded from circular scratches from cleaning? Turbulent air?

Dudes rock, immigrants rock, New York fucking rules

The Princess Elisabeth Island is the world's first artificial energy island, an offshore infrastructure project in the Belgian North Sea. It serves as a high-voltage electricity hub to collect and transmit renewable energy from surrounding offshore wind farms to the mainland.

The empire of light.

El gigante de piedra le canta a la luna. #Moon #Photography #Suesca #Colombia

A year ago, I came up with the phrase Doom Dopamine: the unconscious reward we give people for spreading doom. Take a minute to like positive posts. Cause when alarmist content goes viral & positive posts get 5 likes, it engineers our brains to think doom is rewarding & positivity is not. 🧵

Today’s sunset from las Rocas de #Suesca, the oldest #climbing crag in #Colombia

I work on #geothermal energy projects and find the #geology, and its potential for helping us decarbonise heating, exciting. But…it always frustrates me when it’s framed as being a somewhat out-there, somewhat futuristic technology, when it’s actually been around for *ages*…

Not sure how long it will last, so download it ytdown.to/en2/

The sunset ride. #Cartagena #Colombia

Street performers in #Cartagena, #Colombia.

Cheesy sunset today. But the nacreous clouds did not return.

These pics show some clouds very similar to nacreous clouds (above the dark cloud band). This is about 20 minutes after sunset. Normally #nacreous #clouds form at high latitudes, but this is from Cartagena, Colombia, at only 10.4º latitude North. Any expert around knows if this is possible? 🧪 ⚛️

These pics show some clouds very similar to nacreous clouds (above the dark cloud band). This is about 20 minutes after sunset. Normally #nacreous #clouds form at high latitudes, but this is from Cartagena, Colombia, at only 10.4º latitude North. Any expert around knows if this is possible? 🧪 ⚛️

"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future." - @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit. Incredible words. Listen to all of it!

There was a nice atmospheric inversion layer when my flight took off early in the morning from Paris. Here you see dense fog on the ground that doesn't even reach the top of the wind turbines. The ripples are gravity waves created by the wind turbine towers as the wind blows. 🧪 🌬️

Models are great. Simulations are awesome. Synthetic data is useful. But all of them can also be awful and used to generate bad science. We need to know exactly why we're using any of them, what assumptions we're making when using them, and what those assumptions mean for our inferences.

Take a journey through time down a new NSF COLDEX ice core borehole just completed by the team in #Antarctica! If you’re at #AGU25 stop by the COLDEX booth in the Exhibit Hall to talk to COLDEX team members from across the 15-institution center funded by NSF! @agu.org Follow us on IG @ coldex_stc

This is fucking grim. Somebody invented a white guy, an "IT professional" named Edward Crabtree, who stopped the Bondi shooting and spread it all over the internet, which was picked up by AI agents and slop aggregation sites. The real hero is a fruit stand owner named Ahmed el Ahmed.

If you live in #Belgium, and you want to know what will happen in the sky for 2026, you want to get the mighty Hemelkalender (Sky Calendar) from the Vereniging Voor Sterrenkunde VZW (note: in Dutch). Presented here by #StijnMeuris from #Noordkaap for us! #astronomy youtube.com/shorts/5kQ7I...

All missions should have cartoon versions of their spacecraft, and these cartoons should be on all slides. These are the rules, as shown here by JAXA’s Go Murakami talking about BepiColombo.

Worked on this yesterday with my new found free time with the kid starting school. From HST Proposal 17067, The diversity of protoplanetary disks: Imaging a complete sample of edge-on disks in four nearby star-forming regions Principal Investigator: Gaspard Duchene flic.kr/p/2rnisMm

As I say here, this is not about saving the planet. The planet will be orbiting the sun long after we’re gone. The question is, will there be a healthy, thriving human society on that planet? The answer to that question is very much up for grabs at this point.

New Publication: "Cosmic Rays Masquerading as Cool Cores: An Inverse-Compton Origin for Cool Core Cluster Emission" by Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech), Eliot Quataert (Princeton), Emily M. Silich, Jack Sayers, Sam B. Ponnada & Isabel S. Sands (Caltech) doi.org/10.33232/001...

Tech bros shocked that normal human beings enjoy thinking

As a professional astronomer, I absolutely would not want my children going into this. I hope they have been clear witnesses to my ceaseless anxiety and job insecurity. Yes, funding is much worse now than a year ago, but academia has been a disaster for a LONG time

I mean we are absolutely in a place now where the only solution to this information disorder is for everyone to constantly evaluate the source of information. Never trust a chatbot, but also don't believe a video unless you know and trust where it comes from. Unfortunately... that's a lot of work.

How does global warming cause colder winter storms? whowhatwhy.org/2019/11/23/t...

just get in, I ain't got time for all that explainin shit (donuts)

Wait is this really what it looks like. Why does it look like someone weeping

New project documenting A.I. slop graphics in academic journals neurodojo.blogspot.com/2025/12/new-...

3 days evolution of sunspot groups AR4294 & AR4296 #astronomy #astrophotography #sunspot

The vibrations of an hypothetical planet.

a HUGE sunspot group just made its appearance: 🧪🔭 www.sidc.be/index.php/ar...

Good morning Belgium!

If scientists have some new computer code that makes their specific work more efficient then great. I don’t give a shit but go for it man. But that’s not what this is all about at all. It’s a supposed culture changing force we’re all being pressured into genuflecting in front of and paying for.

This is so disingenuous. No one is angry about AI being used for intense processing of data for scientific and medical uses, we’re angry that the hypemen claim it can *think* or make art or replace human workers. Conflating all of this is the problem.

Patricia Smith just won the National Book Award for Poetry for this collection. The first couple of poems had me in a chokehold. Smith is giving me new life right now.

Oh Soyuz www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh1d...