Really enjoying this classic Sesame Street segment, two minutes of freestyle jazz riffing on saxophone factory footage

AAS Alarmed by Rumored Deep Cuts to NASA and National Science Foundation Recent reports have indicated that the White House may soon be proposing drastic cuts to future budgets for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD). aas.org/posts/news/2...

White House may seek to slash NASA’s science budget by 50 percent arstechnica.com/space/2025/0...

Slack: *any message* Astronomers:

Please look up the influenza epidemic of 1918-19 to understand that the CDC not selecting strains for next year’s vaccines sets the stage for a public health calamity that will, without doubt and at bare minimum, catastrophically and directly impact people you know. This is a five alarm fire.

All the best to @planet4589.bsky.social with his retirement. Will gladly welcome him back to the UK! www.newscientist.com/article/2468...

Because of four decades of bad faith narratives by rich folks who want your taxes to go up and their taxes to go down, most folks don’t know this: career federal workers are heroes who work extremely hard every day and go above and beyond all across America to improve your lives.

Donald Trump’s second term as US President has begun with staff layoffs, slashed budgets, axed diversity programmes and cancelled conferences in what some see as a new "dark ages" 🧪⚛️ physicsworld.com/a/us-science...

From Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social : Today’s paper puts forth an alternative explanation for the cause of recently detected X-ray emission around galaxies! 🔭✨ astrobites.org/2025/02/12/x...

NSF funded this 🧪 www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...

NASA senior review reports from 2022 (the PDFs linked on this page) have been scrubbed from NASA websites. I am grateful to archive.org who retains these and other important reports for our field. 🔭🧪⚛️ science.nasa.gov/astrophysics...

The people who voted for Trump because they thought he’d pull the U.S. back from foreign entanglements and overseas adventurism are really among the prime suckers of our era.

If they "are serious about slashing NSF, the result would be catastrophic, the same program manager warned. Cutting the $10 billion grantmaking agency in half would “gut the intellectual center of U.S. leadership in science and technology,” the official said. www.eenews.net/articles/sci...

Reassuring scared colleagues that their third shift work over the years supporting their community is valuable and good and they should get to own that, and I hope they can again.

"pip install sk8plotlib" if you want to give it a try! Note that rescaling the skateboard to the data in the plot isn't supported yet, & the skateboard always spawns at (0,0) still, so if you have large or small numbers (or a log plot) then it won't like it Instructions on GitHub:

Still not allowed back to our house for another night, but grateful that so far it looks like we have a home to return to. My heart goes out to all my friends and colleagues who lost everything today. #LAFires

Solstice imaging with Celestron Origin - these all came from 2 ~hour-long exposures. Stay up late this time of year, you can see into the Realm of the Nebulae (plus an occasional photobombing actual nebula). M108/M97/M96/M105 and friends.

Recently talked to a student who admitted to using ChatGPT as a study device - by feeding it all of the class lecture slides and having it generate summaries. So now OpenAI has ownership of all the slides my co-instructor and I created from scratch…

The Prime galaxy: the points in the plot have coordinates x = p*cos(p) y = p*sin(p) where p are prime numbers.

The Oort cloud is full of comets or as Jupiter calls them, snacks. 🔭

Is there life after proposals?

And people* wonder why I search for new planets. Look at this. LOOK AT THIS. It’s Io, one of Jupiter’s moons. Isn’t that just about the most evocative surface you could imagine? WHAT ELSE IS OUT THERE? NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill *my mother

Look, John Wheeler was a brilliant physicist, but I just read the famous “it from bit” essay and it is quite the hot jumbled mess.

How you know Elon announced a new feature on Twitter

Well, this is neat! People are already using my step-by-step guide on processing JWST images and producing results after I published the article yesterday. And look, they are following the way I outlined to pay proper credits to the science team 🥹🥹 (still need to stress the usage of alt-text pls!)

Astronomers running to arxiv to read up on dimethylsulfide.

XRISM is out to prove that nature does not in fact abhor a microcalorimeter.

GREAT NEWS! From the latest JAXA briefing: Solar panels deployed, nominal voltage seen, sun acquired, initializing thrusters and reaction wheels. XRISM LAUNCH SUCCESS!!! Congratulations JAXA

Since so many have asked, here’s my hot take on the spherules Loeb found and the manuscript he’s loudly rushed to the world. These are pretty typical cosmic spherules. Had he done the *obvious*--a control sample 100 km away from the meteor--he’d have found the same thing. 1/20

Today, we have new views of the Whirlpool Galaxy from the JWST! I laid the images taken by each instrument side by side, plus the composite, and the Hubble version. You can really see how the mid IR (MIRI) brings a whole new light to galaxies! Which version is your favorite?

I am sorry if this offends anyone, but it is a fact beyond dispute that the Germans make the best beers in the world.

Very excited for JAXA to allow us X-ray astronomers to finally jump into the world of high spectral resolution imaging with XRISM!

Wow! 🔭