Some of my favorites not related to astrophysics:
1) Face processing (a whole quarter on how the brain processes faces)
2) Herman Melville
3) Mesopotamian history (that I parlayed into a trip to Egypt!)
4) Three quarters of art history, mostly 18th and 19th C European
5) Table tennis
NASA’s SPHEREx space telescope has completed its first infrared map of the entire sky!
This is the most comprehensive spectral view of the infrared sky, with 102 colors (or wavelengths) of infrared light from observations made between May and December 2025.
🧪 ⚛️ 🔭
Two technicians in clean suits inspect a the completed Roman Space Telescope in a clean room at a NASA assembly facility.
NASA has completed the construction of #NASARoman! Last month, technicians joined the inner and outer portions of the observatory in Maryland.
After final testing, Roman will move to the launch site at the Kennedy Space Center for launch preparations in summer 2026: https://go.nasa.gov/48EqnE8 🔭 🧪
Graphic promoting the RAS Public Talk for November titled 'Cosmic Dust'.
Our Public Talk this month is all about the mystery of Cosmic Dust
From fragments of asteroids to cometary tails, the plumes of outer solar system moons and even debris from our own activities in space, the talk will have a bit of everything.
⏰ 6-7pm
📅 Tue 18 Nov
📍Burlington House, London
🎟️ FREE
New #Euclid image drop from @esa.int and @ec-euclid.bsky.social! 😍
Meet LDN 1641, a ‘dark cloud’ about 1300 light-years from Earth, observed by Euclid back in 2023 to test its guiding systems. ⬛️☁️
I dunno, dust issues sound relevant.
The first SPHEREx data products have hit the archive!
Let the science begin! 🥁
On May 1, NASA’s SPHEREx space observatory began regular science operations, which consist of taking about 3,600 images per day.
Read more here: spherex.caltech.edu/news/nasa-s-...
Some truly spectacular dust features in these spectra! Wondering if PAH absorption is starting to become important in that most reddened source. 🤔
This image is a graphic for the PRIMA and the Future of Far-Infrared Science hybrid working meeting scheduled for May 19-21, 2025 in Pasadena, California. The background image is a visualization the Milky Way galaxy observed by the Herschel space telescope.
We invite the future @prima-probe.bsky.social user community to a free, three-day hybrid working meeting hosted by IPAC on the Caltech campus. Spots are limited and registration and abstracts are due March 28. conference.ipac.caltech.edu/prima-pasade...
¡Excelentes noticias! El Telescopio de Gran Apertura del Observatorio Simons ya tuvo su primera luz. Con esto, la primera fase de SO, con tres SATs y un LAT, está completamente operativa.
www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/03/17/s...
🚨 BIG NEWS ALERT! 🚨
We’re just 24 HOURS AWAY from a MAJOR DESI release! 🌉🔭
Tomorrow at 3 PM PT, DESI is unveiling DR1, our first official Data Release—the largest dataset of its kind, packed with information on 18.7 million galaxies, quasars, and stars! But that’s not all…
It's paper day! 🔭 Very excited to share that my latest paper, and the first to come from my PhD, is on
arXiv today: arxiv.org/abs/2502.21119
Paper (and press release) week! 🧪🔭
I'm so excited to share this awesome research result from @emmalieb.bsky.social and me, in a collaboration between @uofdenver.bsky.social and @noirlabastro.bsky.social. We made a JWST time lapse to watch the dust shells around WR140 expand!
It's on GitHub and is pip installable already, very very early alpha though so YMMV github.com/emilyhunt/SK...
#Astrochemistry webinar “From Stardust to Life: The Chemistry of Habitable Worlds” by Karin Öberg on January 22nd, www.acs.org/acs-webinars...
Finishing up "Discipline & Punish" (Foucault) with Yaa Gyasi's "Homegoing" up next. Luisa Valenzuela's "The Lizard's Tail" is also on the list for 2025.
My favorite of the genre is some classmates in undergrad who referred to sinh and cosh as "shine" and "coshine."
Herbig also did important work on diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs), a topic of keen interest in my own research.
Hope you are ok!
Throughout my career I’ve collected a nice set of Strong Opinions about relatively unimportant things. Here’s one: Don’t end your talk with a slide that just says “Thanks!” or “Questions?” The slide that remains up during audience questions should be a summary of your main points
Thank you for posting! Really wish I could be there with you all.
What has poked holes in the "Green Monster," the filamentary structure in front of Cassiopeia A? A new research article offers answers. aasnova.org/2024/12/02/n... 🔭🧪
Oh that's where it's gotten off to! I noticed it wasn't in its usual place the last few times I took visitors to see the high bay.
Shades of brown and red colored in on top of strips of paper on a bulletin board. It's a fairly large board, though you can't really tell that from the photo! The lower right is dark and the upper left is brighter.
🔭🧪 Things that make me happy: This is the first image from Mars, taken July 1965. Why does it look like this? Because computers were slow and it was going to be hours before the computer processed it enough to make an image. The scientists and engineers were impatient. 1/5
Astronomer: I need to correct for dust extinction.
Me: Have you considered magnetic fields?
But seriously, they can matter! 🔭
Hard to overstate how cool it was to see this image from PHANGS back in July/August 2022. There are now nearly 75 galaxies with similarly awesome observations in the sample (all public!). 🤩
Loved the title *and* the paper!
If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute, right?
