Sometimes you stumble over to a packed breakout session at your big annual academic conference and learn that some billionaires have decided to build not one, but FOUR, complementary new telescope facilities, and build them fast Well OK then! Happy new year! From their pockets to our skies! 🔭

Eric and Wendy Schmidt are funding a 3-meter space telescope with a coronagraph, and three ground-based observatories: the Deep Synoptic Array, the Argus Array, and LFAST. Funds have been committed and officials say they hope to be operational by 2029. #aas247 www.astronomy.com/science/eric...

Are there any studies yet on what happens to infrared astronomy when we have thousands of solar-powered data centers in space flying across the sky dumping their waste heat as IR radiation? www.geekwire.com/2025/jeff-be...

The paper I reference in here about how studying Earth helped me understand Mars's dust storms is my Nature Astronomy paper about how Mars (and Titan) have a Baroclinic Annular Mode.

“An agency that seeks to lead the world in planetary science but ignores Earth would be missing out on studying the most unique planet yet known in the universe — our own.” www.astronomy.com/science/eart...

So the K2-18 b paper is finally on ApJ Let, with a publication date of April 17. But the press release was on EurekAlert yesterday, dated April 16, as the first news stories posted… iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...