List 3 things you can talk about for 3 hours with no prep. 1. Open clusters 2. Why DS9 is the best Star Trek 3. How to sail a boat ⛵

📣 Attention students! 👩🏾🔬🔭 Want to win a cash prize and certificate for your research? A reminder that we have an award for the best student paper submitted to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 🏆💫 ⤵️

🔭☄️

🤔 another study that suggests GenAI is not helping workers. "workslop is AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task." hbr.org/2025/09/ai-g...

How much is too much to ask when refereeing a paper? I don't feel like the authors quite did what I asked them to in the first report, but they've done *some* stuff. Also, some of the new plots show some potential new issues with the paper. But, I also don't want to be too mean...

If you care about Bluesky (the platform) but do not follow @laurenshof.online's analysis, then you should! Another great piece, this time about creating an open social web while under major threats from authoritarianism.

NGC 55 in H alpha & Oxygen III (both great for star formation) - it looks mesmerizing 😮

I hate SMS two-factor authentication with a passion, it can be so damn slow 😭

If Reform wins the next election, it will be because Labour paved the road for them by pursuing anti-immigrant and transphobic Reform-lite policies, instead of challenging and rejecting this hateful, self-destructive populism. To Reform I say fuck you, to Labour I say do fucking better.

At the risk of repeating myself: there’s no bargaining with these people. What they’re calling for now is mass expulsions of long-term residents deemed insufficiently economically productive. There’s no way these demands won’t get even more extreme by election time.

“Meta has used back-to-school pictures of schoolgirls to advertise one of its social media platforms to a 37-year-old man, in a move parents described as “outrageous” and “upsetting.” Meta has 100% stopped even *pretending* not to be astoundingly evil. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

This fee is absolutely horrendous, and I feel sick for multiple friends in the US or who were planning to take up positions in the US very soon. Hell, even people I spent time with this week at @stellarorigins2025.bsky.social here in Vienna might not get back into the US tomorrow

I would love for a single democrat to reckon with the fact that conservatives are not in fact motivated by reasonable concerns. They are — just as they were with ‘concerns’ over blacks and gays and numerous other minorities over the last five decades — motivated by bigotry.

Lia Thomas met the NCAA requirements for transition when she started competing as a woman. Did the right accept those standards? Or, if they disagreed, argue that they could be more stringent? No. They said she was a man who was unfairly competing and pretended that there were no standards at all.

As usual with this issue, Harris is calling for a compromise that already exists. Every sporting body has standards for how long athletes must be on hormones before they can compete as women. The problem isn’t that we’re ignoring ‘reasonable concerns,’ the problem is that republicans are lying.

History repeats itself.

The Flame Nebula steals the spotlight in this image 🔥, but it’s not the only gem on display! You can also see the Horsehead Nebula (lower right), and the bright, bluish star to the right, which is one of the trio forming Orion's Belt. 🔭

This story about South Koreans with visas (!!!) who were detained is utterly insane. B-1 & visa waiver program visas allow you to do "business activities" like meetings or presentations (which they did). If that now risks getting thrown in jail, conferences in the US are sounding awfully dangerous

On the 🔭🧪 postdoc job market? Excited about science with Rubin and big surveys? Come join us at DiRAC. I’m so excited that we’re able to offer a few of these Fellowship positions this year! Please share, LMK if you have Q’s! aas.org/jobregister/...

🔭☄️ #galactic A *huge* new review of Gaia data came out today!

This week I'm at @stellarorigins2025.bsky.social! Will try and post some of the talks and results I see It's really cool to see astro conferences using Bluesky! #stellarorigins2025 🔭☄️

This is extremely good advice. If you're an astronomer, get yourself a personal website - they are *so* useful to have.

On days like today, I'm really glad to have custom feeds to scroll through for a break from the topic of the day May I recommend:

forget staging protests for abortion rights, or campaigning against domestic violence - The Times has decided what real feminism is for us! 🙄

What happens when a star cluster disperses? Well, it forms a stream of stars - and those streams are all around us! In a new paper by Sebastian Ratzenböck at the CfA / @univie.ac.at, we looked into streams near to the Sun, and found that the Milky Way's disk is *full* of streams! 🔭☄️🧪 #galactic

We're incredibly grateful for Emily having hosted the Astronomy feed herself for two years — a feed which we use every day! There is now an option to support the hosting of the feed so that we can all continue to share astronomy on Bluesky. 🔭☄️

What a summer 🫠 I have travelled 10300 km this summer, 6200 km of which was by train. Moving country has a loooot of back and forth 😅 + a holiday and two conferences!

this is how you do politics. A*

v1.108 is rolling out today 🚚 Now live, at long last: Bookmarks, aka Saved Posts. For all those posts you'll definitely plan to come back to! Update the app and give it a try. The button is right down there 👇

🥹 Thank you!

For the last two years, I've been paying for the Astronomy feeds hosting myself. It has been a privilege to grow our community here, but I also shouldn't keep doing it for free 😅 That's why I'm delighted to announce that we now have a donations page on Open Collective! 🔭☄️ #astrophotography

Our galaxy is full of clouds of dust and gas. We can guess that they probably move, but it's hard to tell for sure. Until now! A groundbreaking new paper by Martin Piecka et al. at @univie.ac.at presents the first *ever* direct measurement of the proper motion of the ISM! 🔭☄️🧪 #galactic

Our galaxy is full of clouds of dust and gas. We can guess that they probably move, but it's hard to tell for sure. Until now! A groundbreaking new paper by Martin Piecka et al. at @univie.ac.at presents the first *ever* direct measurement of the proper motion of the ISM! 🔭☄️🧪 #galactic

just about managed to catch the end of the lunar eclipse, peeking out behind a building and some clouds here in Vienna! 🔭

The Moon is in the shadow of the Earth right now -- you can see images at the stream here!

🔭☄️ #planetsci

bluesky hive mind: is this unhinged conference poster design actually any good? I really want to make something eye-catching that's not just the normal black-text-on-white-background, so I turned the entire background into the main figure still needs layout, text, & figure work, but basic concept:

😲 Every patch of this image is a showstopper. 🤩 Every crop a beauty in and of itself. ICYMI, the NASA/ESA/CSA James #Webb Space Telescope captured this glittering glimpse of starbirth in the core of the nearby Lobster Nebula. 🔭 🧪

People who worked in astro in the past - what do you do now?

one of my talents is ensuring that every discord server I end up in gets a #show-us-your-pets channel also, feel free to post your pets below - I'm not stopping you 💁‍♀️

did henry ford come back from the grave and write this for you

I am SUPER excited for what we could do with this for the Astronomy feeds. I could envision making the feed semi-algorithmic (and giving users lots of customisation options). It would default to be chronological (like now), but could be super customizable. 🔭☄️

"A study examining 2.6m Bluesky posts referencing more than 500k scholarly articles over the past 2.5 years found they demonstrated 'substantially higher levels of interaction' – likes, reposts, replies and quotes – and greater 'textual originality' than previously reported for X, formerly Twitter."

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Can highly recommend The Dictator's Handbook, which is a fantastic political science book that takes an analytical look at why certain political structures last longer than others. I don't think regime length is possible to predict, but certainly the more entrenched it becomes the harder change is

nothing like discovering you have a serious milk allergy while abroad at a conference (I am ok, and some amazing colleagues looked after me, but yesterday was not fun 😅)

If Europe acts like a vassal of America, then it might as well be one 🫤

Bluesky is dying, science edition... [Narrator: Bluesky is not dying.]

quite the range of airport ads so far this morning - Vienna had a creepy yassified AI generated lady advertising a new airport terminal, but Bari in Italy just has a picture of a chef smiling and holding some wheat in a pasta advert

LOL