Almost 90 square degrees in 3d! Dive in!

Finished watching "About Time" yesterday. Started it on Monday - already tells you that it didn't hold my interest. I thought it was super conventional, an ode to conservatism. The guy came off as narcissistic. Gave it 2.5* on LB. Then I find out it's on many people's Top Movies of all time. Huh?

Hot news from the summit at @eso.org Paranal: MOONS has a new home! 🥳 Built in Edinburgh, this beast has 1000 robotic eyes, ready to capture & analyse the light collected from millions of stars in the Milky Way and millions of galaxies in the early Universe. Huge congrats to the MOONS team! 🧪🔭

Number 35 of my 100 movies 1925-2024. Big Epic, lots of Academy Awards!

I am not ready to face the level of cringe in this to dare watching it, but Frank is a lovely interviewer, and there is backstory about why I haven’t shut up about Arp systems for 30 years.

Had a family Eurovision party tonight. My top 3: Australia, Finland, Austria. England and Norway were fun, also.

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

Number 34 in my 100 movies 1925-2024.

Gave a talk in Sonneberg Obsevatory today. Unfortunately, it's largely only a museum. For a while, it captured the variable sky, observing the whole sky in 8 hours or some deeper 20 deg2 in 2 hour chunks. Big unexplored treasure in these photoplates hidden here...

I'm sorry, but nitrogen excess galaxies just scream for an INXS pun, no?

I am sure I am going to enjoy next week ... meetings.aip.de/event/11/

Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

Number 32 of my 100 movies of 1925-2024. This time it's an anti-war movie.

This morning, concluding our very last MUSE Consortium meeting, we look into the future of integral field spectroscopy in Europe (BlueMUSE, irMUSE, uvMUSE, HARMONI, MOSAIC and the ambitious WST). docs.google.com/document/u/0...

MUSE astronomers (our ver last Consortium gathering) going really old school looking through the telescope that discovered the ISM and laid some of the foundations of adaptive optics (the great refractor in Potsdam).

Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

Listening to Moya Brennan in rememberance today. Her album Two Horizons got me through studying for my prelims in my first year in the US.

A halftime show at the World Cup Final?!?! No, no, no. It disrupts the game. US already making this the worst World Cup (and that is after Russia and Qatar)

Number 32 of my 100 movies 1925-2024. 1956 - The Searchers

If you see this, quote skeet with a screenshot from a video game that released the year you were born. Hey, I played this, even...

Today humans have been the farthest away from Earth, they have ever been. Good job, congratulations and let's keep that spirit of exploration alive. Driven by curiosity, not by delusions of might.

Number 31 in my 100 movies 1925-2024!

Project Hail Mary movie. Amaze, Amaze, Amaze!

In Guatemala, of course you go to the coffee plantation as kids. Having weird coffee opinions ("robusta is good, actually, it's not just all arabica") as a 12 year old. Good times.

I think I was co-I on a proposal that went 4th -> 2nd -> 1st (no time) HST proposal, before falling to 4th quartile the next year (really thought we were due!) 🫠

Number 30 in my 100 movies 1925-2024.

Number 29 on my 100 movies 1925-2024.

Can't help but notice the selection committee for this award

I totally forgot to post about this new paper that my colleague Ismael Pessa recently got accepted. Remember when we were totally happy when we detected MgII in emission around galaxies in one object or via stacking? Well, now we make statistics on 47 individual galaxies! arxiv.org/abs/2602.11280

Wie weit erstreckt sich die Andromeda-Galaxie über den Nachthimmel, wenn man ihren ausgedehnten Halo aus Gas sehen könnte? Diese Frage und mehr beantwortet Dr. Ramona Augustin in ihrem Vortrag innerhalb der Reihe Virtuelle #BabelsbergerSternennächte ✨ Jetzt online: youtu.be/59-Ft3DYITs

This is devastating for Carl’s family, and for his IPAC friends and colleagues. We are all shocked and saddened. His contributions to exoplanets and infrared science and the astronomy community will not be forgotten. 💔

The more obscure ones, not so sure about this, because I saw a lot late 90s in the theater, but most remain obscure. Memento (2000) Lola rennt (1998) Jackie Brown (1997) The Craft (1996) The Basketball Diaries (1995)

E.T. (1983) - forever thankful at my mom that she took me at 4.5 years old Jurassic Park (1993) - that scene where they are with their mouth open, that was the theater. Titanic (1997) - happy to be part of the crowd. The Matrix (1999) - went in without knowing what it was about.

Number 28 of my 100 movies 1925-2024!

Um, so the 2026 Oscars DO have a sense of humor. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxpj...

I am back in the same room as yesterday. This time listening to cosmology eminence George Efstathiou at the @aippotsdam.bsky.social colloquium speculating whether Dark Energy evolves (probably not).

David Hogg has written a white paper on doing astrophysics in the age of LLMs. It looks to be thought-provoking. My initial reaction is that either LLMs will destroy the field or they will force a reckoning with and re-imagining of the current system that often prioritizes output over quality. 🧪

Attending the Wempe prize ceremony. This year it's going to Dr. Sebastian Kamann, who did his PhD with us and has been largely involved in the MUSE collaboration. His work has been instrumental in crowded field integral field spectroscopy. 🤩🌟💫

Hubble has captured a new view of the Egg Nebula 🥚 the first, youngest, and closest pre-planetary nebula ever discovered! Discover more about the light show around this rapidly dying star 👉 www.esa.int/ESA_Multimed... 🔭 🧪

It’s not heroic to work when sick or race or play when injured. It’s damaging and dangerous and those that encourage or force it are doing their people an awful disservice (and ultimately harming their own and everyone’s interests too).

This image shows a MUSE NFM image of the AGN in NGC 985 with exquisite spatial detail. The green infalling cloud is ionized by the AGN, while the faint red dots are star forming regions. The sharp feature on the top right is fastly outflowing. Proud of my student Lucas Ramos Vieira that found it.

I just heard somebody say in a talk: "this is from a fairly old paper" - it was 2018!

Number 27 of my 100 movies 1925-2024.

Oh, no! Not Catherine O'Hara... 😭.

After a successful commissioning process, 4MOST has reached the next major milestone before the full survey begins: Operations Rehearsal 4 (OpR4) ✨ Image: Carlos la Fuente launching the first observation for OpR4 (Credit: Jakob Walcher) #4MOST #astronomy #astrophysics

BlueMUSE-Vereinbarung: Blaues Licht für das VLT. 🎉😊 Die @eso.org hat am 30.01.2026 eine Vereinbarung mit einem großen internationalen Konsortium für das Design und den Bau von #BlueMUSE unterzeichnet. Das AIP ist an zentralen technischen Arbeitspaketen beteiligt. 🌌 www.aip.de/de/news/blue...

Really happy that I was able to witness the signing of this instrument by ESO. Congrats Johan Richard 🥳 (the PI). Before the ceremony, some of the consortium members took some group pictures, great team that built on the experience of building MUSE!

Cool, just heard from @galacticrave.bsky.social that the INNA project next to ESO Paranal region has been called off and thereby preserving the dark skies over Paranal, Armazones and La Chira. www.aesandes.com/en/press-rel...