If your document/paper/presentation/etc. needs or has a table of acronyms, you have too many acronyms. This is an accessibility issue. People read *words*. They don't need the extra step of thinking about what acronyms mean or frequently going back to a reference table. Stop using acronyms!

If Charlie's wife hands him a sandwich every day through the train window, why doesn't she just include a nickel too so he can get off the train?

Celebrating Mother's Day the only way we know how around here: by taking so long to get ready that we hit the next naptime.

I really really wish I could get my fellow co-authors on this paper to make their comments in the Overleaf. Instead, they're all annotating their PDF copies as usual. 🔭🧪 We are probably all marking the same things! We could be saving so much time! We could be responding to each others' comments!

🔭 A cautionary tale for undergrads (and above!) using AI for #astro plots: our BSc student wanted to make a "quick" HR diagram showcasing M-dwarfs & thought some chatbot could make one and... well... ...extra credits are now offered to students who can correctly find all errors on cursedHR.png 🫠 🧪

Smith College is now under investigation by the Department of Education for admitting trans students. archive.ph/Zn90w

Our daughter still doesn't crawl, but she has finally figured out how to scoot around on her butt... backwards, anyway.

How the night sky is being ruined. This 10 minute exposure to image a comet, which is only visible just before sunrise, has been completely overwhelmed by the trails of satellites (the majority of them Starlinks) passing across the field of view.

We need to make a "rain plan" for student thesis presentations this week -- not because they're outdoors, but because it's currently raining inside our building! 🙃 (pipe burst)

YouTube music keeps doing crap like putting Death Cab in my '80s country queue, so I finally bought a cassette player for my car. Excited to no longer be sharing my data for $20/month!

When Einstein developed general relativity the closest thing to a practical application that could even be imagined at the time was a slightly more precise description of where to look for the planet Mercury in the sky, and yet now we’d all be literally lost without it. Anyway: fund basic research.

This week, NASA announced it had shut down one of that spacecraft's remaining science instruments — not because the mission has failed, but to keep it alive a little longer. n.pr/41HfdLS

Packing to leave for a conference tomorrow and suddenly realized I'm supposed to GIVE A TALK the morning I arrive. A literal nightmare -- seriously, a nightmare I've actually had many times before -- almost came to life right there, oh boy.

Our REU renewal was funded! We found out today so we are accepting applications now! Like right now! Application review is going to happen swiftly as we know we’re are late in the typical cycle. pa.msu.edu/undergraduat... #reu #physics #astronomy #research

Finally Hampshire College is closing for real. As someone who attended another weird hippie school (Reed), I feel so much affinity with Hampshire. I'm co-advising a Hampshire Div III project (i.e. thesis) right now and it's been so cool to get insight into their world.

On the plus side lately, my first honors thesis student is finishing up their impactful project, and soon my 12 observational astro students will be finishing their mini-research projects on SO MANY cool topics. This is the best part of the semester.

Parenting is turnout to be ridiculously, terribly incompatible with my "early-career academic" schedule. If I'm out of town for a talk, conference, observing, etc., someone needs to pick up my daughter from daycare each day and watch her until my spouse gets home. How can I say yes to anything? 🧪🔭

The President's Budget Request proposes a 47% cut to NASA Science, a 55% cut to NSF, and a 13% cut to the DOE Office of Science. AAS President Dr. Dara Norman sent a call to action to AAS members via email today. Urge your members of Congress to reject these cuts now! aas.org/reject-2027-...

"A slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing" -- this is exactly the problem. This should be required reading for everyone in our field, especially those earliest-career students.

Rocket launches are always inspiring on such a deep level. We watched it together. :) 🔭

Hi astronomers 🔭 -- we have a couple openings this year on SGMA, our LGBT+ AAS committee. Please consider applying! It's fun work!! :) Deadline is April 18, and the application is a google form (see the post below).

Teaching Baby to crawl using all her favorite objects: electrical cords, fingernail clippers, TV remote, cell phone. (their illicit nature is a draw, apparently)

Once upon a time, you'd go to give a talk at another university and a nice administrator would hand you a W-9 to sign and they'd send you a check in the mail for the honorarium. Now you have to spend a half hour entering data on a Special Contractor Website that was designed in a lab by sadists.

#AAS248 The Society's FAMOUS Travel Grants program helps members from historically underrepresented groups attend AAS meetings. Grant requests for the summer meeting (14-18 June 2026) are due by 16 April. aas.org/grants-and-p... 🔭

Spring break 2026: two days of blissful, uninterrupted work, five days of being a human sofa because Baby is sick again. 😭

Visiting MIT Kavli today to give a talk. Today started rainy but I guess it's getting brighter!

The other day someone referred to me as Baby's mommy, and today someone else assumed I'm a straight cis man. Gender is made up lol

This morning it's 48 degrees and misty and my heart says this is how the air is supposed to feel, just perfect and connected to the world seems pretty clear we need to move back to Oregon

Every evening: Watching my baby expertly maneuver the spoon into her own mouth and still manage to get 99% of the food on her face. How??

Good morning! Yes, this is he

AAS President Dara Norman and Past President Kelsey Johnson published an opinion article in SpaceNews today titled "The future of astronomy is both on Earth and in space." The article is signed by 15 past, current, and incoming AAS presidents.

Husband has been doing all the cooking since Baby arrived. Tonight I said "hey btw I bought a salmon and forgot to tell you" and he's like no problem, sounds fun ♥️

My institution has declared a snow emergency "parking ban" tomorrow (i.e., no parking on campus), yet classes are not cancelled. How is that supposed to work? Did my faculty teleporter get lost in the mail?

Our daycare teacher at dropoff today: "so did your baby start eating solids recently? Because I got KFC for lunch and she tried to steal it right out of my hand... several times..."

Someone at work asked my pronouns and I was so excited I rambled on for several minutes straight. What the HECK, brain! That's not good for making friends!

Reviewing my recent paper proofs has taught me that I really love hyphens... and my AAS journals copy-editors do not! 🤣

After 2 weeks of daycare, baby (and I) are on daycare cold #2, and I'm realizing I should have just stopped my immunosuppressants this month 😓

Astronomers/physicists: is the postdoc job market this year ultra difficult? I know seven people with no job offers right now, and I feel like they would have had many offers in previous years. In my career, I have never seen this lack of jobs at the postdoc level before. 🔭

Our AAS Education Committee report on 'The Landscape of Undergraduate Astronomy and Astrophysics Degree Requirements' is now available on arXiv: www.arxiv.org/abs/2602.03959. Please give it a read!

The next issue of "the Solar Neighborhood" is up! 🔭 In TSN 54 we present 54 orbits of nearby M dwarf binaries. These come from our 300-star, 4-year speckle program at SOAR. Also included: 1000+ relative astrometry points -- keep watching these for longer orbits later! arxiv.org/abs/2601.18905

Some new recommendations from our AAS Working Group on Graduate Admission: aas.org/posts/news/2...

Holy crap, teaching while parenting is a serious step up in difficulty. Will baby go to daycare tomorrow, or will she stay home sick? Will she be ok with going to meetings? Will two zooms in a row be too many? Should I just cancel everything now?

We got 20 inches of snow (and counting) in western Massachusetts. Here you see our fence (4 ft high), trash bin, and a mountain formerly known as our 2007 Subaru Outback.

Baby's first trip to the emergency room ✅ done! (She's fine -- turns out she's so big and strong, she just needs way more Tylenol than the box suggests)

Our paper has been accepted and is on its way through the journal machina. "The Solar Neighborhood #54" will feature 54 orbits. That worked out so perfectly! 🔭🧪

So apparently she cried so much, all the other babies in the room cried all day too. A natural born leader!

Just dropped baby off at her first day of daycare, and now I might cry -- from pure *relief*. She gets to be with real playmates and I get to have hours and hours of work, chores, coffee, all those wonderful boring adult things. 😌

Night 3: captured this dramatic view of PRISM nearly sweeping the floor as the Perkins telescope slew deeply toward the east. 🔭

Night 2: the students got more comfortable controlling the music, and consequently we listened to 11 hours straight of Beyoncé. It would have been 12 hours, but at hour 11 my music app ran out of Beyoncé songs.

Night 1 completed with beautiful skies, and six new students now trained on the Perkins 1.8m! This group is really super excellent. At one point I got to take a nap.