🌟 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).

More on our @zooniverse.bsky.social plans with the new @vrubinobs.bsky.social blog.zooniverse.org/2025/06/23/v...

In Huntsville for events marking 30/35th anniversaries of the Astro shuttle missions featuring UV telescopes. This was above the hotel registration desk. They really do want me to feel at home.

We’ll be hosting one at UA. If you’re around Tuscaloosa come by at 10am on Monday!

SARA consortium telescope scheduling needs big lab tables pushed together to see all months/days/lunar phases. I spent about 4 hours on campus for this, heard a sound down the hall. Summer intern in particle-physics lab next to my former office was practicing trombone etudes. The kids are alright.

Radio astronomer Cyril Hazard (1928-2025), one of the discoverers of quasars, died on Jun 14. In 1963 Hazard got an accurate location for 3C48 and 3C273 using lunar occultation, allowing optical astronomers to find the optical counterparts and measure their redshift.

<starts looikng at DESI spectra to add companion info for a galaxy sample> Oh, look, the first redshift I checked is obviously wrong by a factor of 13 due to flux offset between segments masquerading as the 4000-A break and outweighing 5 emission lines. I hope this is rare...

🔭 APOD is 30 Years Old Today Image Credit: Pixelization of Van Gogh's The Starry Night by Dario Giannobile apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25061...

Consortium telescope scheduling requests are slow coming in this semester. I just had to remind everyone that I've spent way more than enough time at DragonCon to know where to source d16s and d20s but they probably don't really want to go that route.

Another astonishing JWST image from the PEARLS team!

Did you know YOU will be able to work on NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory data in your free time as a volunteer scientist?🔭🧪 We've partnered with the Zooniverse, a platform where researchers build projects for volunteer scientists. Find out more at rubinobservatory.org/explore/citizen-science 📷: B. Quint

must be incredibly frustrating and disheartening to have federal funding that was promised to you for important work suddenly and arbitrarily ripped away

EPSCoR. Which created my faculty job and set the group up for decades of success (like my 30 consecutive years of NASA funding) and a century's leap in the experience we could give students.

🌟 The June 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

Galaxy colleagues: there are many results on the incidence of warped stellar disks in edge-on spirals, but can anyone point me to detection statistics of warped/disturbed dust lanes as seen in attenuation (which have truncated detection geometry compared to stellar disks)?

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