Colors! A lög! Dangerous ice dunes you shouldn’t walk on, especially in the dark when nobody else is around and nobody knows you’re down at the beach instead of the bookstore like you said, no matter how much you want to get the aurora reflected on the ice and water!

It’s Penguin Awareness Day which seems like a great excuse to post the greatest ever Wikipedia edit.

How to get into nature.

Aurora aside… What a pretty starry night.. #SpeirGorm

These are the icy mountains of Pluto. It took 9 years to get these magnificent images… and 4.8 billion kilometers.

Cow Tools. OMG.

To give you a sense of how powerful a supermassive black hole is: This one blew out a structure 30x the size of our Milky Way. The galaxy where the action started looks like a dot in this image. The black hole itself is an invisibly tiny dot within that dot. 🧪🔭 academic.oup.com/mnras/articl...

So one cold night a young iguana fell out of a tree on the road outside my work. I was driving a golf cart around the property and had exactly zero urge to handle an iguana, aggressive and ornery creatures that they are, but a truck was coming and I couldn’t just leave it there to get run over, so…

This sort of discourse is my raison d’être (for coming online at all anymore).

Made a new playlist

#CASSINI ORBITER #SATURN MISSION Target: #Dione Time: 2011-10-01 Body Center Distance (km): 488391.389 Camera: 15x Narrow Angle CLEAR Filter opus.pds-rings.seti.org/opus/#/instr... NASA/JPL/j. Roger

Sirius star trails shot from the early morning of 14 January. Atmospheric scintillation at its finest 😀 #Astronomy #Astrophotography

See that larger white blob at lower left, and the smaller blob to its right? That's Earth and the Moon. Photographed from the orbit of Mercury.

The other night I dreamed that there was something like the Kardashev scale to see how advanced a civilization was but instead of measuring how much energy they had harnessed it was whether or not they had yet created SpongeBob

Just a reminder that NOAA releases monthly desktop screens with calendars featuring deep-sea animals and its reminder right now that at least some in government are still wholesome oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/multimedia/c...

“If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design” (Source: mastodon.social/@heliographe...)

Sailing Rigs xkcd.com/3193/

Finally, here is my composite image of the #Geminids peak on 13/14 December 2025. It was by far my most successful observation of a #MeteorShower, with over 260 meteors within 5 hours - what a night! The image is a composite of 61 individual shots of 15s and contains 65 Geminids. #Astrophotography 🔭

On the left, Venus with an overexposed sunlit side and infrared night side. On the right, and a little further away, are Earth and the Moon. Observed in ultraviolet and infrared by Japan’s Akatsuki orbiter at Venus on October 21, 2016. flic.kr/p/2maa5QV

"I was completely overwhelmed by the beauty of it all, to the point of forgetting everything around me! A sky of absolute purity, free from artificial light.”   This is how astrophotographer Julien Looten remembers the night he captured this VLT view https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw2602a/ 🔭 🧪

This bobtail squid burrowing into the sand is already adorable, but please watch till the very end! It sticks out its little arms and earnestly sprinkles sand over itself 🦑𓂃◌𓈒𓐍

Saturn and its rings.

SO cool. What a humbling gift, to glimpse the motion of things so huge and distant, operating on a time scale so incomprehensibly vast.

Tros Crater, a 90km (57 mi) crater with wide white ejecta on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. flic.kr/p/2m4Dj8a

we’re in the vet’s office waiting room and they just called for Agamemnon. we all looked at the Great Dane but it turns out Agamemnon is an orange kitten in a backpack that makes him look like an astronaut cheese puff

This is stunning. Listen to this in Philadelphia. Thousands singing “Hey-Oh, we won’t be silent while our friends are gunned down.” Really listen to it.

"The Philosophy professor at A&M has decided to comply with instructions to replace the readings from Plato... with the New York Times article about how he had to replace the readings from Plato" — David Paternostro

A group of young kestrels is startled by the presence of a butterfly. 🤣🤣🤣

Lobate ctenophore. @schmidtocean.bsky.social dive 651 #sepacificseamounts #MarineLife

💜☔ Thu, Jan 8 Yesterday, J & K pod traveled about Puget Sound. This morning they were audible on the Sunset Bay hydrophone placing them somewhere in the north end. Hopefully they are finding enough salmon for themselves & the new little babe K47! 📸 New calf K47 by Rachel Haight 1/7. #psws

Galileo Galilei wrote a letter with the first mention of Jupiter's moons #OTD in 1610, Ganymede, Callisto, & the combined light from Io and Europa, now known as the Galilean moons. By the 15th he had seen all four & named them the Medician Stars in his March, 1610 treatise, Sidereus Nuncius.

A few pages from the Harmonia Macrocosmica, a star atlas written by Andreas Cellarius, published in 1660. The engravings are by various unknown artists. The Harmonia is often called the most beautiful star atlas ever created. [images via Marriott Library at @utah.edu #space #stars #maps #astronomy

Finally! Tens of thousands of asteroids are found each year. Yet 2026 had ZERO through Jan 6. The drought is over. Possibly as big as a jet liner. Possibly as large as a football field. Meet 2026 AA. Blame the Full Moon for the drought.🌕 Expect many more soon.

My man, I'm 37, and I've barely even begun to find Bugs

it probably shouldn't make it worse that Renee Nicole Good was a pretty fine poet but it does

Had this on in the background all afternoon and it was kind of great. At this point music not dictated by the most uninspired of algorithms is straight up refreshing.

Just think how long it took to develop our telescopes, cameras and image processing well enough for some cool humans to make a quarter-century time lapse gif of a supernova. Golden age of astronomy stuff, right there.

Silver kings shimmer under the bright white light of the Wolf Moon night #tarpon #silverkings #coralcityafterdark #wolfmoon #marineastronomy #shimmer #brightwhitelight #night #coral #coralcitycamera #miami #portmiami #biscaynebay #coralcity

A List of Predictions Made in 1926 About 2026 🧵

NASA's Hubble Examines Cloud-9, First of New Type of Object science.nasa.gov/missions/hub...

The world-shifting life’s work of the most kind and thoughtful people our country ever knew is being purposefully undone by the ones who would have benefited the most from their help, but missed out, and instead became the most cruel and thoughtless amongst us.

An orange creamsicle sunset tonight. The human world might be a hot mess but the natural world is still fantastic as hell.

The star Miaplacidus (β Carinae), a giant star 113 light years away. Nearby at eight o'clock is IC 2448, a planetary nebula which is 100 times further away, at 11,000 light years. January 1st 2026 #astrophotography

Wrapping up post on data collected before Christmas. Pleiades open star cluster taken with ASI 1600mm and William Optics z63. 4 hrs of LRGB data. #astrophotography

Forskalia from @schmidtocean.bsky.social dive 651. So perfectly designed to catch prey. I love them. #sepacificseamounts #MarineLife

What’s your favorite thing you read in 2025? Fiction books, nonfiction books, essays, poems, manual, scientific study, kids’ book, recipe, anything at all! 📖 📚💙

I asked the xkcd Emojic 8 Ball how the new year was going to go and it gave me a volcano, a shifting hourglass, and a heart with a bow on it. Since I just moved to a spot 40 miles from one volcano and 50 from another, I interpret this as “live for the moment.” 🌋 ⏳ 💝 xkcd.com/1525/

Triton, moon of Neptune, seen in front of Neptune from the receding Voyager 2 in 1989.

regret to inform you that new year's day is a social construct

I decided to ask the most trustworthy modern oracle -- xkcd's Emojic Magic 8 Ball (xkcd.com/1525/) -- about my upcoming year, and: Either I am definitely going to have a good year OR I am going to be subject to a volley of 100 rocket attacks. High variance year is what I'm getting out of this.