New factoid shared at a meeting here at Space Telescope: #JWST's guiding is so stable that it's like flying a laser pointer on a drone in Washington DC, and pointing it perfectly at a dime (like a UK 5p coin) in San Francisco ~4000 km away.

I simply cannot cognitively offload the fact that the president of the country I live in is this unhinged. This has got to stop.

I didn't expect this: FIRE data suggests that Creighton was the most ideologically conservative campus in the entire US in 2025.

Very nice FIRE dataset on ideological leanings of US campuses, fully downloadable on GitHub (github.com/chapin-lenth...). Here are current campus breakdowns of ideological leanings vs. right-wing tolerance.

This line from James Gleick has been in my head rent-free for months: "Using ChatGPT to write your term paper is like bringing a robot to the gym to lift weights for you." (www.nybooks.com/articles/202...) So I abused GPT-5.4 into illustration this self-criticism.

🔭 Storytime! This paper consumed my soul for a month and it turns out that you have to look at your 2D spectroscopic data. Thread... ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024OJAp...

6/10

This should be getting better as we leave solar maximum. Here's an update of HST altitude vs. sunspot number.

If you were dropped at a random point in the Milky Way, there is a less than one in a hundred billion chance (1 in 100,000,000,000) that you'd ever have enough starlight to read a book.

Great result from BU graduate student @lbor.bsky.social hit the arXiv today shedding light on the origins of strange white dwarfs that have stopped cooling for billions of years: "WD Merger Remnants with Cooling Delays on the Q Branch Lack Strong Magnetism" arxiv.org/abs/2602.02670 (1/7)

You might’ve heard the news: SpaceX just passed 10,000 Starlink satellites launched. And that number is already old news, as there’s now a new Starlink batch launched every other day. Here’s what that looks like in a short animation of Comet A6 Lemmon courtesy of Michael Jaeger:

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

And a new EO late last month (www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...) reclassifies NASA employees in a way that instantly stripped them of their union representation. Goddard plays a huge role for NASA and it is being kneecapped by the Trump administration.

Here are all the missions that face cancellation as part of a devastating 47% cut to NASA's science program. www.planetary.org/articles/bil...

Drone show over Boston Harbor for the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride. I’m sure just as he’d have expected.

Eye to the sky…on-sky engineering tests have begun at NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory using the world’s largest digital camera! 🔭🧪 After installing and testing the LSST Camera, we turned the telescope to the sky—a moment 20 years in the making! With that, Rubin #CommissioningNotes are back ✍️ 🧵

Success! IWitnessed the Mayan serpent god Kukulkan’s #equinox appearance at Chichen Itza! On the equinoxes, the stepped pyramid’s corner casts a shadow from the setting sun onto the staircase, making a diamondback snake whose head is illuminated at the bottom. #astronomy

LLMs continue to disappoint me. Have a look at this swing and a miss from what should be in a LLM wheelhouse.

Jupiter rotation timelapse with lo (and shadow) transit! Taken Feb 8th from my backyard. Went out at 5 min intervals to capture a video. From each of these, the best 10% were stacked to produce a single frame (lucky imaging). 🔭C9.25, 📷 QHYII1585C #jupiter #astrophotography #astronomy

Trying to keep calm knowing that this federal funding move blatantly violates the Impoundment Control Act and will be challenged quickly (www.stevevladeck.com/p/120-the-im...). But it's clear that the Velociraptors are out of the cage and are currently testing the limits of the enclosure.

I just got proofs back from ApJ and I'm deeply disturbed by how a copy editor thought this was a valid correction. Am I crazy? Is there ever a valid reason to use "consensual" in this way? What is a "consensual picture"?!

Here's a fun backstory to a paper too many years in the making: "Sporadic Dips from Extended Debris Transiting the Metal-Rich White Dwarf SBSS 1232+563" (arxiv.org/abs/2501.02050) which just hit the arxiv.

A story we ❤️about how exploring the Universe can re-ignite passion. And we don't mind that it's about looking at our white dwarf spectra in @jjhermes.bsky.social group 🤩🔭 www.bu.edu/articles/202...

Updated periodic table with origin of elements in the Solar System (for boron and lithium at least)