After seeing Wicked 2: For Good, I now anticipate seeing someone at DragonCon cosplaying Glinda cosplaying a Nazgul.

When reviewing a journal submission, I might imagine that someone castigating the authors for poor use of English might take care to use only actual English words in their complaints. But maybe not.

So it turns out this is the timeline where everyone on the Medicare email list gets mental health advice signed by Dr. Oz.

🌟 The December 2025 edition of The Evening Sky Map is available to download at skymaps.com/tesm/. The PDF features a Sky Calendar and easy-to-use sky maps for the northern and southern hemispheres, as well as equatorial regions. Please share, and enjoy exploring the Universe! 🔭 #stargazing #space

Aurora from Tuscaloosa, Alabama! (Shot with my Moto phone propped atop car; I ran a bunch of DSLR sequences and its battery is recharging before I can download). That's a lifetime total of two by now! Red color was visible to the eye.

Sure, but it would be spectacular on a 16-bit binary odometer.

Pat Henry is handing the running of DragonCon over to his daughters (of whom I interact with Rachel Reeves annually). Heartening but unexpected, this is a big enough deal for the city to be covered in the Atlanta Business Chronicle. Bonus, a bit of origin story. www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news...

Hmm. Manufacturer of doorbell cameras has new default mode where an AI goes through all the streams in a neighborhood to find lost pets. What could go wrong, whether it can be hacked or not?

Manuscript referee report is just back from journal. It obviously got a very close reading. The reviewer insists that minus signs in coordinate designations (of which hundreds occur in the tables) should use LaTeX $-$, not just -.

Oh. Halloween-themed arxiv submissions are now a Thing. Or in some cases a Thing from Another World?

🌟 The November 2025 edition of The Evening Sky Map is ready for download at skymaps.com/tesm/. The PDF features a Sky Calendar and easy-to-use sky maps for the northern and southern hemispheres, as well as equatorial regions. Please share, and enjoy exploring the Universe! 🔭 #stargazing #space

Montage of images we got from Space Track overnight down in the Hilton in Live Astronomy, remotely operating 1-meter observatory telescopes in AZ, Chile, Canary Islands. Finally finished data processing and color-compositing (we saw only single-filter greyscale at the time). Come join us in 2026!

Reading The Martians by David Baron, I was struck by a time early in the history of the canal controversy - a single erudite and well-connected proponent convinced a broad public of something that almost the entire astronomical community said was, at best, not proven. No reason, why do you ask?

From collaborator email this morning: "I have deconvolution code and am not afraid to use it (even when maybe I should be)." (Does it even matter whether HST or JWST is the context?)

Hubble image of Arp 297, also known as NGC 5754 and NGC 5752. The pair's interactions created kinked arms in NGC 5754 (the large spiral galaxy) and the blue star clusters in the core of NGC 5752 (the smaller galaxy). Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage team, W. Keel Source

🌟 The October 2025 edition of The Evening Sky Map is ready for download at skymaps.com/tesm/. The PDF features a Sky Calendar and easy-to-use sky maps for the northern and southern hemispheres, as well as equatorial regions. Please share, and enjoy exploring the Universe! 🔭 #stargazing

Today in "everything is connected if you pull hard enough".

Won't name and shame, but an interesting abstract in #arxiv was just posted using multiple "private" macros for phrases, many pointless math mode tags, and part of the text which was behind a %. Colleagues, think of your readers! (Not much of a pet peeve these days, but if your aim is readership...)

🌟 The September 2025 edition of The Evening Sky Map is ready for download at skymaps.com/tesm/. The PDF features a Sky Calendar and easy-to-use sky maps for the northern and southern hemispheres, as well as the equatorial regions. Feel free to share, and enjoy exploring the Universe! 🔭 #stargazing

OK, ready or not, I'm declaring the PPT visuals done for my solo panel on "Stars that go bump, bang, or boing in the night" for DragonCon Space Track on Saturday evening. With any weather luck, we can show folks ongoing supernova explosions in Live Astronomy overnight each night.

This is again a reminder that college isn’t supposed to just teach you a job but is supposed to teach you how to think, because that job you’re training for might not exist when you graduate

Ahh, here's my tentative DragonCon schedule. Live Astronomy each night, right, "Interstellar Objects" seem to be out but "Things that go Bang, Boom, or Boing in the Night" is in. OTOH this early in August even the science track schedules remain somewhere between fantasy and science fiction.

Note for bystanders: this is an artifact of a time decades ago, when scientists communicated by means of "preprints", physical copies of submitted work circulated because submission-to-publication in some journals could take a year.

"AI" is IT from A Wrinkle in Time. "Just give in," the AI pushers say. "We can all be together in this. You don't have to think." Time to hold onto your inner Meg, friends.

I am old enough to have seen a performance by one of Tom Lehrer's "American Musical theater"classes at UCSC. He found musicals for them to perform that I couldn't quite believe had actually been written (ex:"Jupiter Forbid"). R.I.P. and hoping Alabama doesn't get the Bomb.

🌟 The August 2025 edition of The Evening Sky Map is ready for download at skymaps.com/tesm/. The PDF features a Sky Calendar and easy-to-use sky maps for the northern and southern hemispheres, as well as the equatorial regions. Feel free to share, and enjoy exploring the Universe! 🔭 #stargazing

Боже мой!

Working on visuals for a talk on interstellar objects at DragonCon in 5 weeks. (Thanks to colleagues such as @chrislintott.bsky.social and @astrokiwi.bsky.social for all the simulation detail!). I am now bracing myself for the inevitable inclusion of the AV-lobe phenomenon.

Current SN Ia 2025rbx in NGC 7331 is really bright and in a photogenic spot near the nucleus. (5m each BVR during morning twilight, 1m Kapteyn telescope on La Palma remotely operated by SARA consortium). 🔭

This is true.

Today in research progress: Oh, look, these curves I trusted myself only to derive numerically have an analytical expression (not surprising) derived by an anonymous user on the stack exchange math forum. (The paper is still headed past 45 pages, though).

HUNDREDS of NASA employees sign a declaration protesting the brutal attacks by Trump and his regime. I signed it too, as should you. Plus: Incredible image of dusty spirals blasted out by a terrifying binary star. badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/nasa-decla... 🔭🧪

Kind of niche but enthusiastic cheer! Someone (specifically de Menezes et al.) finally replicated the long-slit spectroscopic reduction capabilities of IRAF in Python. Finally. I withdraw that particular longstanding grouse about the state of Python use in astronomy. arxiv.org/abs/2507.13443

Good fortune to be on the right path to see the Moon temporarily ringed by bright stars of the Pleiades this morning (and similarly one Saros cycle ago, with students at newly-renovated campus 0.4m). Canon DSLR+zoom at 250mm and Celestron Origin, both 0.5s exposures, cropped for lunar reflections. 🔭

Prepping for my 22nd DragonCon. I mostly present in Space Track (visit overnight Live Astronomy in the Hilton as we operate remote observatory telescopes!) and Science Track, with forays into military SF and animation. I do keep a broader eye out - here's a montage of some views from 2024.

Timelapse of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS +background stars in Ophiuchus from 16x1-minute exposures last night (1m Jacobus Kapteyn telescope on La Palma through SARA remote ops). Unlike bound outer solar-system objects, most of its apparent motion is intrinsic, not reflex of Earth orbital motion.🔭☄️

LLMs : They do linear algebra. They interpolate within their training data. They will not do original research.

New study just out from Beverly Smith et al. of multiple galaxy merger IC 2431 including Zoo Gems HST image, a target selected by @galaxyzoo.org volunteers. Dust lanes may suggest two of the disks had near-planar encounter. arxiv.org/abs/2507.10439

Family get-together in a cabin in the Mississippi woods. Me (67) to sister (58): "Look at us sitting at the grown-ups' table!"

Anybody know the formal name for the Rubin Observatory data drop with the Virgo and Sagittarius images? Web pointers don't seem to include that yet (it's not Data Preview 1, for example). Seriously, needed for a publication.

US Friends! The Green Bank Observatory (GBO) is a vital instrument in the global #RadioAstronomy network (incl. pulsar science), and it is under threat with the proposed funding cuts. Please take action to keep it open: www.gogreenbankobservatory.org/take-action/ Pls share! 🔭📡🧪 📸 GBO/AUI/NSF

Wondering about the proper citation format for "thing I'm not really supposed to know about yet, but people inside X project absolutely could not resist showing me and I don't want them in trouble".

Getting old projects in order: montage showing some backlit-galaxy systems selected by @galaxyzoo.org volunteers in Hubble Zoo (plus a few serendipitous finds). After detailed analysis, these may help shed light on the cosmic evolution of dust in galaxies. Even the coldest dust shows up this way. 🔭

New Horizons is so far away that the nearest stars have shifted markedly from where we see them on Earth. With the NH observed positions for two stars, from NH imagery alone we can figure out where the spacecraft is. This technique would be used on interstellar voyages. arxiv.org/abs/2506.21666

“Third star from the left and straight till dawn”.

"Far from a bold vision for American leadership, the administration has presented Congress with a blueprint for falling catastrophically behind on space exploration just as China and other nations are surging ahead." - Bill Nelson www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/o... (gifted article, no paywall).

End of an era. Bye bye UKIRT. www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2025/06/27/h...

🌟 The July 2025 edition of The Evening Sky Map is now available for download at skymaps.com/tesm/. The PDF includes a Sky Calendar and user-friendly sky maps for the northern & southern hemispheres, and for equatorial regions. Please share, and enjoy exploring the Universe! 🔭 #astronomy #stargazing

Volunteers with @galaxyzoo.org are already finding candidates for Voorwerpjes (giant gas clouds ionized by AGN extant or extinct) in first image release from @vrubinobs.bsky.social. This one is much better than the subtle blue streamer I found. (Copied for astrosci stream).🔭

Volunteers with @galaxyzoo.org reporting the first candidates for Voorwerpjes (giant AGN-ionized clouds) in initial @vrubinobs.bsky.social images. (Much better than the subtle blue streamer I found).