From Ryan White @astroryan.bsky.social : There are a few locations in the solar system where the push and pull of gravity mellows out and you can orbit in (relative) peace. Read all about these islands of tranquility we call Lagrange points! ⚛️ 🔭 ☄️ 🧪 astrobites.org/2026/01/29/w...

Stories from #SpaceAustralia in 2025: Checking out the God of Chaos — Apep — using JWST and the VLT. This unique triple stellar system is wild! Some nice work on one of the papers here led by fellow Macquarie University student Ryan White! 🔭

6 days of sunspots evolution. AR4296 and AR4294 OK, this is getting really tricky to arrange. :-} #astronomy #astrophotography

One thing I will miss about UQ is the incredible biodiversity on campus. Thread of all the animals I photographed yesterday along one stretch of railing about 10m long. (warning to the squeamish about bugs) Starting with this bronze hopper (Helpis minitabunda): (1/N) #bugsky #nature #spidersky 🌿

🔭 Apep: Unusual Dust Shells from Webb Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, JWST; Science: Y. Han (Caltech), R. White (Macquarie U.); Image Processing: A. Pagan (STScI) apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25112...

I love this way of explaining papers!! Check this out by @astroryan.bsky.social !

Very excited to share the NASA/ESA/STScI press release of our team's work on Apep! It's a terrific writeup, complete with a brand new beautiful visualisation of the nebula geometry. 1/? ⚛️🔭🧪 science.nasa.gov/missions/web...

More h-alpha solar timelapses. Here's a loop of plasma twisting off AR4247 from yesterday around 21:30UTC. This might have been part of a small C-class flare. I think it looks like a tornado on the Sun! 🔭 #astronomy #astrophotography

This is exactly the reason every mission and scientist should have a wide-open data policy! PUNCH has specific science objectives (looking at the solar wind) – but in the right hands the data can reveal amazing things NOT part of our original science. Giving those hands access is best for all. ☀️🔭🧪

Absolutely delighted to read this news after an anxious wait - Christian Schwab and I will be looking for a postdoc on extremely precise radial velocities at Macquarie soon! Congratulations to everyone on what looks like an unusually large haul of projects for astronomy.

Really cool astrobite about a really cool paper!

My attempt at Comet A6 Lemmon from subpar conditions last night. Wispy clouds still visible in the final image. Was surprisingly bright, p sure I could see it with the unaided eye! Easy through binocs. Canon R5, RF100mm f2.8 19 images, ISO 800, 30s f3.2 🔭 #astronomy #comet

1.5 hour timelapse of the Sun in hydrogen-alpha. I set this up quite late in the day and the Sun was pretty quiet so I was surprised how much evolution is visible in the prominences, granulation and the active region. I'll have to try more of this. Video is set to loop forwards, then in reverse 🔭

In a companion paper, PhD student @maxecharles.bsky.social applies this to reconstructing complex images, not just fields of dots. We apply a regularised maximum likelihood method to restore clean, diffraction limited imaging by fitting directly to pixel level data.

In the first paper Louis Desdoigts (ex PhD in my group, now Leiden postdoc) learns a model for the entire AMI system's optical physics together with a neural network 'effective detector model' the sensor, which suffers from a serious 'brighter-fatter effect' that blurs images at the pixel level.

Thrilled to have two years' of work out, in a pair of papers led by @gradientrider.bsky.social and @maxecharles.bsky.social. We've built a data-driven calibration of the James Webb Interferometer to near its fundamental limits for high-res imaging - explainer at @aunz.theconversation.com!

ME/CFS is a devastating condition that has long been denied, dismissed, psychologised and underdiagnosed. Research is at last starting to catch up with it, with glimmers of hope for those who have been left untreated for so long. There's a huge BUT coming ...🧵 www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Okay people, welcome my new paper into the world!!! With Isabel Colman and @farrwill.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2510.02255

And as a bonus, here's a false-color composite of the same. Blue is mapped to all of visible, green is infrared beyond 850nm, and red is the methane band at 889nm. 🔭 #astrophotography #saturn

Been imaging Saturn while its rings are nearly edge-on and tried some infrared filters. At this 889nm methane band, Saturn strongly absorbs light, whereas its rings scatter equally across wavelengths. Also a good visual demo of how astronomers measure exoplanet atmospheres! 🔭🧪 #astrophotography

Sometimes I think about how from 1935-1975ish, Bell Labs produced an insane amount of revolutionary science and technology, including 11 Nobel Prizes, the transistor, UNIX, C, the laser, the solar cell, information theory, etc. The secret? Provide scientists with ample, steady, no-strings funding.

Research also shows that spreading smaller amounts of funding out over more researchers generally delivers better scientific outcomes per dollar spent than focusing bigger grants on fewer researchers. journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

There have been two hosts in the history of Reading Rainbow. The Legend of Literacy, LeVar Burton! And... me, Mychal Threets, a librarian 🥹🤯 I am a reader, a librarian because LeVar Burton and Reading Rainbow made us believe and see we belong in books, we belong everywhere ✨ youtu.be/e7es7qdWVnU

Happy Pub Day to Earth and Earth-like Planets by Devaki D. Devi 🥳 Earth and Earth-like Planets is officially out for publication! 🧡 All pre-orders will be shipped as soon as possible.📦 If you haven't ordered your copy yet, you can purchase one here: www.abodepress.com/product-page...

This work owes a lot to ideas of and conversations with Rodrigo Luger, Keaton Burns, Geoff Vasil, and Ben Roberts, and it's been a really fun project with Shashank! ... and Shashank is on the postdoc market now, so if you're working on stars and planets, Jax, imaging science and applied maths...

Reposting for the #astro feed! 🔭

New paper by me and @benjaminpope.bsky.social! How well can we map a star using optical interferometry? This is just a submitted preprint at the moment--comments and questions welcome! (1/N) arxiv.org/abs/2509.25433

So there are many far better photos of the International Space Station transiting in front of the Sun, but I was pleased to get my own humble version today. 🔭

Time for the promised thread on ε Eridani b! I should emphasize this manuscript is a submitted draft—comments from the community are very welcome. Bottom line: ε Eri b is likely a 1.0 Jupiter-mass planet, only 3.2pc away, on a 3.55 AU near-circular orbit, ~aligned with its debris disk. 🔭🪐🧪 [1/7]

Tawny Frogmouth. Looks like a cross between a muppet and an owl. Possibly one of Australia's weirder birds. Taken with Canon R5 & 300mm f4 on Aug 31 #birds #NaturePhotography #Nature #ausbird

Images from Palomar at 2 different infrared wavelengths last night - one that Saturn's methane atmosphere absorbs, and one the it reflects! (The faint point source is the moon, Tethys!) Taken by David Ciardi, Catherine Clark, @lowbacca.bsky.social and Miranda Felsmann; animated by me (and ezgif!)

For those of you who don't know, I used to be a professional landscape artist! I've made an account for my art here on bsky, and I'll be trying to post a painting every day from my back catalogue. Follow to see how I developed as an artist over the years!

First detection of polarised reflected starlight from a Hot Jupiter? The signal seems big! Wiktorowicz+ arxiv.org/abs/2509.19172 🧪🪐🔭

An ant? No, an ant-mimic spider (Myrmarachnae). These are from the family Salticidae (jumping spiders) and you can see it in their big binocular front eyes. Although they have 8 legs they often wave their front two like antennae just to get in character. #bugsky #spidersky 🌿

They’re only Tim Tams if they come from the Tim Tam region of Australia. Otherwise they’re just:

anyway here's the .png export from powerpoint in question

Incidentally, Mario Savio was an astronomer and they torpedoed his education for decades before memorialising him! youtu.be/lsO_SlA7E8k?...

gonna be a bit Woke here but a lot of my work at the moment is about Fisher information in various contexts and I'm not super keen on the eugenics connection. Have people in other fields settled on good alternatives for this? Asymptotic precision?

This is the spectroscopic transit of a #planet with an orbital period of 1.5 YEARS !! #HIP41378 🪐 In case you missed the great paper led by Salomé Grouffal (#ProudAdvisor), arXived over the summer, here is a recap'. #Thread [1/8]

I've had the privilege of reading these stories and I really loved its incisive read on the desi diaspora. If you like flash fic along with a dose of magical realism, preorder this book! And I may be biased but it's a great title and cover art too! #booksky #reading

Hi yall this is a collection I worked so hard on & I'm so so grateful to Abode & to the editor Diamond & to my cover artist (chaoberries on IG!) It really came together so beautifully and I hope desi diaspora (esp if you grew up in the 2000s!) resonates w these quiet but contemplative stories 💜

Congratulating Doctor Louis Desdoigts, who has just passed his viva! I couldn't be happier. Louis is the first student I've supervised all the way through from Honours through to PhD and we've done so much science together. I don't know what I'll do when he goes to Leiden!

Beyond proud of Louis Desdoigts (gradientrider.bsky.social), who submitted his PhD this week alongside the magnum opus paper we've been working on for the last 2 years. It's been not just a pleasure but a privilege. He's off to Leiden soon as a postdoc and you should invite him to give talks!

This is a really fascinating blog post about the first ever precise measurements of a main sequence star's diameter in 1956! (And how the fact that it worked raised tons of theoretical questions) 🔭☄️

I'm not going to repost it and give it any air, but I am sad for the astrophotographers who I follow who have to watch AI slop soak up a lot of awe from the astro-loving public, and also raise the bar unrealistically for real (and incredible) astrophotography achievements.

From Sarah Stevenson: In today’s classic 1956 paper, the authors measure a stellar diameter and kick off a debate about the quantum nature of light! 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/08/14/h...

Community video for Severe ME awareness day, please share and tag politicians and public figures who need to see this! All participants IG handles tagged at the end 💙💙 #SevereME #SevereMEAwarenessDay #MECFS #MillionsMissing #UnitedForME

With clear evidence of a genetic predisposition linked to relevant biological pathways, these findings need to mark a turning point away from medicine's historic failure to correctly research this disease and meet its duty of patient care. #MECFS #DecodeME

One of my fav episodes to host so far!

Timelapse of the altocumulus undulatus clouds over Brisbane yesterday