ugh the ramifications

Helpful!! Guy who “watches a lot of YouTube videos” mansplains dark matter to me in the elevator upon noticing my department newsletter in the stack of mail I was carrying

Are you an astronomer or aspiring astronomer wanting to improve your software engineering skills? Applications for Code/Astro 2024 are open! More info at semaphorep.github.io/codeastro/. Application is linked at the bottom of that page. Apply by Feb 16!

SAO REU Alums! The Annual SAO Astro REU Reunion Lunch will occur as usual on Wed Jan 10 - meet at the AAS registration desk at 12.30 on Wed. Please pass the info on to other alums you see at AAS

In the Search for Life beyond Earth, NASA Dreams Big for a Future Space Telescope Astronomers are moving ahead in planning NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory, a telescope designed to answer the ultimate question: Are we alone in the universe?

“Called the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) and targeted for launch around 2040, this would be by far the most ambitious and sophisticated telescope yet built. But its primary goal is almost childishly simple—to hunt for life on 25 Earthlike worlds.” 🔭🪐

JWST Observers Set World Record for Astronomical Proposal Submissions

“The total time requested [in Cycle 3] is almost 48,800 hours, corresponding to a ~9:1 over-subscription of observing time.” 😳

www.stsci.edu/contents/new...
🔭🪐

NASA’s Lucy Surprises Again, Observes 1st-ever Contact Binary Orbiting Asteroid - NASA Science NASA's Lucy Spacecraft took images of asteroid Dinkinesh, discovering that the asteroid has the first-ever contact binary pair orbiting the asteroid.

Why are 'moon moons' exciting? A very short 🧵 🪐🔭🧪

Euclid's first images: the dazzling edge of darkness

Have you seen these beautiful first images from the ESA Euclid mission??

(PS. I love how the images flip from largest (galaxy cluster) to smallest (planetary nebula) on the website!!!)

🔭🧪

Check out this movie from YESTERDAY's flyby by Lucy of the Dinkinesh asteroid - IT HAS A MOONLET. 😍

www.nasa.gov/image-articl...

(Does bluesky support gifs??)

#JWSTCycle3 will officially be the most number of proposals received for any one ground- or space-based proposal cycle in the history of astronomy, beating ALMA Cycle 6 by ~100 proposals. Unofficial number is ~1,937 JWST Cycle 3 proposals.

As Project Scientist, I’m proud that JWST is the most in-demand telescope the world has ever seen.

As a fellow proposer, my thoughts and prayers are with the panelists who have to wade through all ~1900 proposals, and with all those great ideas that won’t get time.

I saw some of the sample here at LPL on Monday. It was sort of like meeting Meryl Streep, so famous I was speechless.

🙂

Squidward admiring his work

Closing my 7285901 chrome tabs >>>

Rest now, my poor laptop

Jwst proposal still unfinished.

“Pepe Silvia” conspiracy meme from It’s Always Sunny

Astronomers trying to pull together last minute changes to their JWST cycle 3 proposals today 🔭
(It’s me)

Check out this awesome Astrobite article featuring my latest first-author paper! Big thanks to @spacejunellie.bsky.social and @astrobites.bsky.social! 🔭🌙

To the [Exo]Moon and Back: Understanding Limitations of Exomoon Detections Could we detect exomoons through transmission spectroscopy of exoplanets? Today’s authors seek to understand if HIP 41378 f could potentially host an exomoon!

From @spacejunellie.bsky.social: Could we detect exomoons through transmission spectroscopy of exoplanets? 🔭

astrobites.org/2023/10/18/t...

Here’s a better pic for context! ☀️

iPhone photo of the Sun, appearing as a "pacman" shape during a partial solar eclipse

Live view of today's eclipse from 30,000 ft ✈️

Nice! Looks like your implementation is similar to QTpy, but you added more options than I had the patience for when I wrote it lol. If you want to optimize, Cython might be the way to go (I know Kristo Ment did this for his quad tree here: ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023AJ.....)

This is cool! I had fun writing a quad tree code for my last paper (shameless plug 🙂):
astroqtpy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

A good reminder that stars are not actually perfectly uniform disks! Will be interesting to see how the community deals with stellar contamination in future observations of rocky planets around cool dwarfs 🔭

Spent days trying to debug this silly code only to realize that all the synthetic stellar spectra I downloaded are just... empty FITS files for some reason?

Transmission spectrum graphic of the exoplanet K2-18b made by NASA

𝗥𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝗲 𝘀𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 '𝗼𝗰𝗲𝗮𝗻 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗲𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗹𝗶𝗳𝗲'.

Ok, probably everyone has seen the headlines about K2-18b by now.

I've put together this thread to collate some thoughts on why many exoplanet astronomers are pretty sceptical about these claims - THREAD (1/N)

Exoplanet Observation xkcd.com/2828

🫠🥴

I can’t believe Cassini was just getting ready to launch 🤯