Tick Tick Tick BOOM WINTER IS (officially) COMING.

Top #Equinox fact: Today is the day that the Sun rises due East and sets due West. At the December solstice the sun rises in the South East. At the June solstice it rises in the North East. As the days pass between the two, the sunrise position slowly changes passing due East each equinox.👇🤩 🔭🧪

⏰ Start your countdown clock for the exact moment of the autumn #equinox, 19:19 (UK) 22nd Sept, when the Northern hemisphere and Southern hemisphere are equally illuminated. Today the day length in 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Scotland is ~the same as in 🇳🇿New Zealand 🤓🧪🔭 📷: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

Celestial alignment captured by @peterlewis55.bsky.social this afternoon! Behold the Moon, on its journey around the Earth, moving to temporarily block out the light from planet Venus. 🔭🧪 Absolutely cracking photos Peter - thanks so much for sharing!

I know we don't like bots, but this one does produce some stunning displays. It's beautiful #maths in action with some lovely music to go with it. Happy weekend all 🤗

This is the peer reviewed journal article that studied 17.5k people across 169 countries to conclude that regular micro-acts of joy boost mental wellbeing: 📖: www.jmir.org/2025/1/e72053/ You can join their citizen science Big Joy project here 🧪 😃: ggia.berkeley.edu/bigjoy

Is this Hippy-woo-woo? No, it's an actual scientific study🧪🤓 "Deliberately finding gratitude, offering kindness or giving ourselves moments to experience awe are...courageous & effective ways of gently steering your own ship, even through stormy times." ℹ️: www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-...

Describing the NASA Perseverance Rover on BBC Radio 5Live "Well, have you seen the film WALL-E?" 😂 Fun fact: At top speed Percy moves 2.5 metres per minute which is only 3x faster than a garden snail 🐌 In 4.5 yrs he's travelled 23 miles, so only 3 more to go to complete the Mars Marathon! 💪 🔭🧪

NASA #Perseverance is one step closer in its mission to find signs of fossilised microbial life on Mars with an analysis of the "Poppy seed & Leopard spot" features seen in Mars mudstone from an ancient river valley. Mineral formations like these on Earth are created by marine microbes. 🔭🧪🧵

What has Percy found now? NASA Press teleconference tomorrow Wed Sept. 10, 11EDT/16UK on the analysis of the Mars "Sapphire Canyon" rock sample from the suspected ancient river valley area of the Jezero crater 🤓🔭🧪 🎬🍿: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-StZ... 📷: NASA/JPL-Caltech #Perseverance

Well that was splendid! A patch in the Edinburgh clouds cleared to see the moon in Pac-Man mode for the last 1/2hr #LunarEclipse. Got overly excited explaining to passers by that the upward motion of the moon was because the Earth turns, & the shifting shadow was because the moon is orbiting us 🤓🔭🧪

The #LunarEclipse is underway: the full moon is slowly moving into the Earth's shadow. Totality starts at 17:30UTC. If you're stuck under clouds and/or sunlight, timeanddate are live streaming the moon as seen from the dark clear skies over Cyprus and Dubai 🔭🧪 🍿: www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1Sx...

Abernethy Scouts have sent me a list of space questions for "Ask the Astronomer Royal Anything". I've covered aliens, killer asteroids & living on Mars, but am now really struggling to answer their last Q: "who is your favourite Star Wars character?" Is it Chewie or Han - a tough tough decision.

Good morning! 📷: Portobello Beach, Edinburgh, 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Scotland 🤗

UK-peeps: Sunday's #LunarEclipse is going to be tricky as the horizon is mostly in the way 😬 If you're keen not to miss it, try a dress rehearsal: spot the moonrise today/tomorrow & you'll know where to look on Sunday 🤓🔭🧪 Location-specific moonrise 🕰️: www.timeanddate.com/moon/uk/edin... 📷 S. Harvey

As a coding dinosaur (mother tongue fortran) my "suck-it-and-see" approach to python isn't as strong as it should be. @joezuntz.bsky.social spat his tea out when reviewing a recent commit, kindly pointing me to PEP8 & "black". It's pure magic! Now my code is so pretty 💃 ℹ️: pypi.org/project/black/

#ProudParent moment. Eldest (on Sousaphone) and her street band Golden Grooves at the Porty #BigBeachBusk yesterday. A big happy bopping crowd even though it was properly raining (shakes fists at clouds).

I can hear Bagpipes crossed with an Oasis cover. It can only mean one thing: the #Portobello #BigBeachBusk has started. If you're in #Edinburgh, hop on a 26 and come on down to the beach to witness this once-a-year musical madness!

Delighted to announce the AeroSpace Science and Education Trust (ASSET) have invited me to be their Patron 🥳 ASSET run AeroSpace Kinross & the Cosmos Planetarium - super excited as they move to the building phase of their aerospace discovery centre! 🔭🛰️ #scicomm ℹ️: aerospacekinross.com/our-mission/

🔊Calling 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿P6/7,S1/2/3 teachers: the AeroSpace Kinross ✈️Air Race Challenge is on! Enter with a paper aeroplane design. Complete challenges with 2 remote controlled quadcopters (kit provided for free). A flight-themed day out for the winners! #scicomm🎢 ℹ️: aerospacekinross.com/schools-air-...

Happy Monday to you all! This morning's sunrise on Portobello beach (and yes that is me in the water) 🤗 📷: Lynne, fellow Porty sea swimmer.

Aug 30th: Portobello's #BigBeachBusk If you're in #Edinburgh, pack your Tamborine & come to the beach to hear the most wonderfully disorganised & joyful cacophony of 100's of buskers lining the prom. "DIY day out. No tickets, no booking, no asking for permission. The only rule: everyone be nice!"

New dept guidance on using AI when writing research dissertations. Love the bluntness of this part: "it is important to understand its limitations, for example it can make up content that is factually incorrect" Bottom line: submitting AI-generated content as your own work is academic misconduct.

Eldest child has popped by to practice the Sousaphone which has summered over at ours while she's been away travelling the globe. Cue comical deep farting noises coming through the wall. Ah how we've missed her. 📷: Golden Grooves

A rather misleading headline in the BBC this morning: the UK Space Agency is definitely not being scrapped! #UKSA will change from being an exec agency of, to a unit within, the Dept of Science, Innovation & Tech, reducing UKGov red tape. Thoughts?🧪🔭🛰️ ℹ️: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Edinburgh book fest = astro-author friends come to visit🥳 Lovely Portobello tea with Dr Sheila Kanani @saturnsheila.bsky.social. If you've got 8-12yos in your life check out her latest "Can you get music on the moon?" It's jam-packed with wow inc Rosetta's singing comet and deafening bat volume! 🤗 🔭

🎥360-filming with Hannah and Steve from AeroSpace Kinross & Cosmos Planetarium! We're making a planetarium show about the fab opportunities & careers in 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Scotland's rapidly growing space sector. It'll be on tour with the inflatable dome visiting all Perth&Kinross high schools this year 🥳 #scicomm 🔭🛰️

Gosh where to even start! 🤯Jupiter and Venus are very far away from Earth. They are definitely not shining in front of the moon! 😂 ↙️ Yes Jupiter & Venus are close in the sky today if you're awake at ~4am, but tonight the moon is far off to the right. 🤓 On Aug 20th they'll be closer ↘️ 📷:Stellarium 🔭🧪

Mark diaries: 1 yr from today! 12th Aug 2026: total solar eclipse🌞🌚🌍 for Northern Spain, Greenland and West Iceland. Where's the best spot? Well eclipsophile.com has kindly calculated the average Aug cloud cover & Spain looks v promising 🧪🔭 📷: M Tomasso ℹ️: www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/sola...

Delighted that my #RoyalMail assisted postal correspondence with 95yo Mr Pritchard continues. In his 1st letter he asked about cosmology, so I sent him the best book there is (if you haven't read @astrokatie.com's The End of Everything, you should). Good news - he loved it: "Astonishingly good!" 🤗🔭

In my prep for LBC📻 on the fab life of Astronaut Jim Lovell RIP, I saw this 🤯 from new NASA Administrator Duffy: "We wanna get there first and claim that for America" Does he not know or not care that such an act would be prohibited by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty?🧪🔭 ℹ️: www.npr.org/2025/08/08/n...

☃️ Oh wow - Rubin is in a winter wonderland! ☃️ My northern hemisphere upbringing is making me feel ever so Christmassy just looking at this snow-fest, but do stay safe out there Cerro Pachón colleagues! 🔭

Mark diaries: 1 mo from today! 7th Sept: total lunar eclipse (Moon-Earth-Sun alignment) for Europe, Africa, Asia & Australasia 🥳🔭🧪 A total lunar eclipse is faint red because it's reflecting the sliver of light from all sunrises & sunsets across the globe 🥰 www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/luna...

"The pith o' sense, an pride o' worth, Are higher rank than a' that." On this exam results day, I'm loving the Scottish Qualifications Authority Crest mix of wise old owls and Rabbie #Burns. Middle child got the results they wanted! #ProudParent 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

It's 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 exam results day! Huge congrats to those who got the results they wanted. Commiserations where things haven't worked out as hoped. S6's who've missed out are in a very good position to find an alternative uni course through clearing - lines open today. ℹ️: study.ed.ac.uk/undergraduat...

He's setting himself up to fail with this question, but I can vouch that the @philplait.bsky.social newsletter is certainly one of the greatest written-word series! The latest astro news delivered straight to your inbox & written in a way that everyone and anyone can understand.🔭 #WeLovePhilFanClub

Fab #r4today @megschwamb.bsky.social on how Rubin Observatory commissioning just happened to be looking in the right place at the right time🧵👇 The ~7-mile-wide interstellar #3I/ATLAS comet roams through our galaxy, currently speeding through our solar system to pass Mars in early Oct!🔭🧪 📷: SkyLive

"I'll have that" Burglar Bill - a childhood story favourite 🤗 RIP Allan Ahlberg.

Let me take this moment to also congratulate & thank the amazing Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal for 30 years! Esteemed theoretical astrophysicist, pop-sci author, tireless campaigner for the protection of dark skies, a genuine gentleman. Retired from astro-royal duties, but still sciencing! 🔭🧪

Big day for the matriarchy! 🥳 Huge congrats to the awesome Prof. Doughtery, lead on the Jupiter-bound ESA JUICE mission & STFC Exec Chair. If anyone's confused on the astro royal hierarchy: Michele and I are the astro equivalents of 🇬🇧Westminster and 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Holyrood 🤗 ℹ️: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... 👩‍🔬🔭🧪

👇All very depressing. I tell my students they can AI-cheat the weekly quiz (or old-school cheat by asking last yrs class), but that it's not going to help in the long-run. They must pass the final closed book exam and working through the weekly quiz is their best way to understand the material. 🤷‍♀️🧪

Another cracking @vrubinobs.bsky.social shot, found while writing a piece about this utterly awesome new observatory. A shame that efficient modern-day astronomy doesn't need oldies like me to go and collect the data. I would so love to visit this site!!! 🔭 📷: RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/NSF/DOE/AURA

“We knew that this was not going to be pretty.” Proud that my Uni commissioned this report: it'll be a hard read. Will be even prouder if they now act to redirect all ancient bequests linked to slavery & colonialism to fund/support more Black staff & students. ℹ️ www.theguardian.com/uk-news/seri...

Huge congratulations to the ever wonderful and amazing @chrislintott.bsky.social on his BBC Sky at Night Silver Jubilee! But the question the whole nation now wants answered Chris: is this the cosmic ghoul? 🔭

I see the Royal Society saga still rolls on. "It has now emerged that the president-elect.., Sir Paul Nurse, suggested to Musk in May that he should consider resigning his fellowship....Musk did not respond, however". 🤦‍♀️ what an own goal ℹ️: www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

🔊 Two really massive black holes, COLLIDING💥! LIGO has seen ~300 of these collisions since 2015, but this one is HUGE creating a black hole 256x the mass of the Sun. It's likely the merging black holes were themselves the by-product of previous mergers 🤓🔭🧪 ℹ️: www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

🤓Geeks Assemble! It's "Embrace Your Geekness Day"! Tell me how you are celebrating! Me, I've spent an hour reading papers on magnetars (neutron stars with stupidly strong magnetic fields) that can spew-up torrents of neutrons to bind with other chemicals & make GOLD✨! 🤓🔭🧪 ℹ️ arxiv.org/pdf/2501.17253

Wow! Check out the gorgeous movie that the Parker Solar Probe made on Christmas Day!🎄☃️🎁🤶 It was travelling past the Sun at 430,000 mph (i.e London to New York in 30sec) at a distance of only 9.85 Sun-Radii above the solar surface. Temperatures were > 1000℃ 🥵 🔭🧪 🎥: www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1dT...

🔊Calling #Glasgow 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 - cancel your Sun night plans & book a free ticket to see the Star Trek science advisor and Astrophysicist @drerinmac.bsky.social talk about Spacetime as part of the world's largest scientific conference on gravity 🤓🤗 🖖 Everyone is welcome! 🔭 🎟️: iop.eventsair.com/gr24-amaldi1...

The #AnimalsAtObservatories thread has taken a horror-movie turn. 🔭 🕷️ Monster Spiders from Space 🕷️