Unfortunately, we will be canceling our Public Night tonight, 4/18, due to the weather. We hope to see you at another Public Night this season! The next Public Night on our schedule is Statewide Astronomy Night on 4/25, and we will be open then rain or shine.

Artemis II from our 0.8m at Mt Kent, more than half way to the moon.

To track it we are pointing fairly close to the nearly full moon - reminds me of that scene in The Dish #artemis

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@noirlabastro.bsky.social no CHIRON for 2026B hurts. Hopefully a special call comes out.

The Earth is not flat…

Hope you all can make it to our first pubic night of the year!

Our 2026 Public Outreach schedule!

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JWST: the telescope that keeps on rejecting good proposals.

The Lafayette College Physics Department is hiring a laboratory and demonstration coordinator! Come work with me!

hr.lafayette.edu/2026/02/24/p...

Proud of our @michiganstateu.bsky.social Astrophysics graduate students who won a Michigan Space Grant Fellowship! astro.natsci.msu.edu/news-events/...

Longest stellar eclipse This record is for the longest stellar eclipse. This record is measured in years and days. This record is for a naturally occuring astronomical event. For the purpose of this record, a stellar eclipse...

Too bad the world record went to TYC 2505-672-1 and not us.... I still remember receiving an email from the Guinness World Records and thinking there was no way it was real. www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-record...

The Blood of the Cactus The Blood of the Cactus - Kindle edition by Rodriguez, Joey. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading The Blood of the Cactus.

Apparently, there is someone with my name who wrote some sci-fi/dark fiction books. I now get the occasional random email from authors who are looking to connect and ask about the book. Way too much golf to play for me to be writing sci-fi books, but incase anyone is interested.

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are you an undergrad wanting to learn about or get more experience with ML/AI + TESS data? apply to work with me through the MSU Advanced Computational Research Experience for Undergraduates!

applications are open until Feb 15, 2026

icer-acres.msu.edu

don't hesitate to reach out with questions!

Your Support Will Make a Big Difference!
MSU Observatory’s public programs are led by volunteers and supported by donations, and currently reach about 2000 people each year.

givingto.msu.edu/causes-to-su...

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So sad to see astro PhD programs charging >100$ per application in a year where a very poor acceptance rate is expected.

Incredible image from our student observers!

We had such a fun time at the Halloween public night last Friday! Thanks to everyone who stopped by, we'll be open again for public nights in the spring.

Join us tomorrow (Saturday) from 7:00-10:00pm for public night at the MSU Observatory! We have lots of fun moon and astronomy activities planned!
Visit our website for FAQs: web.pa.msu.edu/astro/observ...
Address: MSU Observatory, 4299 Pavilion Dr, Lansing, MI 48910

Educational Program Coordinator II - East Lansing, Michigan, United States Position Summary The program coordinator will maintain the planetarium, present live shows, and create new planetarium visualizations. In addition, this position will assist customers, assist in educa...

If any of you fine folks are planetarians in (or want to be in) mid-Michigan, the Abrams Planetarium is hiring a full-time-staff position for the first time in 11 years!! Come work with the astro, scicomm, and informal ed folks at MSU!! 🔭 🧪 (reskeets welcome) careers.msu.edu/jobs/educati...

Join us for these free astronomy events tomorrow, September 27th! 🌌
🌙 Night hike and night sky observing with Abrams Planetarium at Burchfield Park: www.lansing.org/event/burchf...
🌙 Public Observing at the MSU Observatory: web.pa.msu.edu/astro/observ...

I'm hiring 1-2 postdocs this year! If you're interested in:

GW astrophysics
(Binary) Stellar Evolution
Stellar dynamics (esp. w/ massive BHs)
Galactic dynamics (inc. stellar streams)

plz consider applying! You don't need letters initially, just a list of references.

🔭🧪

aas.org/jobregister/...

number of astro bachelor degrees over time, showing rapid recent increase

~ 1000 astro bachelors degrees given out last year, a new record, while most grad programs are planning to admit fewer students this year (due to reduced or uncertain federal funding).

200,000+ Deep Learning Inferred Periods of Stellar Variability from The All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae Stars exhibit a range of variability periods that depend on their mass, age, and evolutionary stage. For space-based photometric data, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated success in...

rotation periods! variables! machine learning!

arxiv.org/abs/2509.14423

So proud of what we are accomplishing at @michiganstateu.bsky.social using our campus observatory. Scientific outreach and research from an incredible group of students.

Billions of years in the making, just in time for Friday night viewing. Swan Nebula (M17), Pinwheel Galaxy (M101), and Whirlpool Galaxy (M51a) captured with our 24-inch telescope.

A series of concentric black and white ovals against a black background, with a dim red dot in the lower left of one of the paths of a black ring. The ovals are dust rings around a young star, and the red dot is a 5 Jupiter mass exoplanet called WISPIT 2b.

Proud supervisor moment: #LeidenObservatory graduate student Richelle van Capelleveen led one of two papers on our discovery of WISPIT 2b, a 5 Jupiter mass exoplanet clearing a path in a circumstellar disk. Laird Close and his team saw it in H-alpha, indicating gas accretion #astrodon 🔭 🧪

The Loeb Scale: Astronomical Classification of Interstellar Objects The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is expected to increase interstellar object (ISO) detections from a few over the past decade to potentially one per few months, demanding a systematic classification sche...

Remember that AAS research notes were rejected from arxiv… arxiv.org/abs/2508.09167

We were able to get the application portal closed for the astronomy graduate program at @michiganstateu.bsky.social for the upcoming cycle. Not an ideal circumstance, but we wanted to communicate this to the community as early as possible.

4.5 years and running at MSU is my record. I moved a lot in grad school.

Best unsolicited email/call was I heard of was the person who said they had visited LHS 1140 b and described it in detail.

Scaling K2 VIII: Short-Period Sub-Neptune Occurrence Rates Peak Around Early-Type M Dwarfs We uniformly combined data from the NASA Kepler and K2 missions to compute planet occurrence rates across the entire FGK and M dwarf stellar range. The K2 mission, driven by targets selected by guest ...

Kepler mission: smaller stars have more short-period, small #exoplanets.

Theory: the smallest stars won’t have enough disk material to make small planets so there must be a turnover.

Kepler+K2: We have found a turnover!

Check out our newest Scaling K2 paper: arxiv.org/abs/2508.05734

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🔭🧪☄️