3-panel comic. (1) (A person with a picture of a spacecraft behind head.] PERSON 1: There are now three spacecraft headed to Europe: NASA’s *Europa Clipper*, which will investigate Europa’s subsurface ocean, (2) [Person is gesturing at a picture of a different spacecraft while talking to a person with a ponytail and a person with short hair.] PERSON 1: ESA’s *Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer*, which will study the topography and chemistry of Europa and the other moons, (3) [Person with a picture behind head of a Zamboni with a rocket launcher underneath] and the NHL’s *Zamboni Voyager*, which plans to resurface Europa. PERSON FROM OFF-PANEL: Oh no. PERSON 1: We tried to stop them, but the league is set on an expansion.

Europa Missions

xkcd.com/3234/

Thank you. Feeling a wee bit better now. 🙂

Rejections completely suck 💔 I know the odds for big grants/fellowhips are long and I should be used to it by now but its still a rubbish feeling.

Its hard not to feel gutted after putting so much time and effort into a science vision over many months.

Having a wee bit of a grump befour moving on.

Thank you. I was wondering about how copyright appled and how that would be covered if using an image made by others.

Glad I am now aware of what is needed if do want to included these spectacular colours images.

That’s reassuring, thanks 😁
I’m glad to hear people are open to it, and those MNRAS/ApJ examples are exactly what I needed.
Also: huge respect and thanks to the image makers - you and the community pull out details in creating these, which somehow miss even after months with the data.

@royalastrosoc.bsky.social is there president for this when publishing?

Loving the stunning JWST colour images on here 🌌 Some are even from my programmes.

Im writing an MNRAS paper for one of these regions—would it be weird to ask the creator if I could include their image with proper attribution? How do you even reference Flickr in a paper?

What do you think? 🔭 #JWST

This is one of the wildest job ads I’ve seen, and unlike Shackleton’s legendary unhinged ad, is definitely real
🔭🧪

www.higheredjobs.com/details.cfm?...

Rather like this normally but not when I have an afternoon of outside activities planed with baby lambs and chick's. 🥶🐣🐑

The Artemis II core stage continues into space under the power of its four RS-25 engines as the two solid rocket boosters fall away.

This shot of the Artemis II launch goes hard

Credit: Brian Balail (@balail.bsky.social)

This does raise the horrifying prospect that someone might rub a software update and we're going to end up with a spaceship with Copilot on it. And thanks to the documentary "2001: A Space Odyssey" we know how that ends.

First Woman to go to the moon.
First far-space plumber.
Toilet crisis averted thanks to Christina Koch: what a legend 🤩

The radio stations I've spoken to so far this morning about #Artemis are very taken with the whole loo-saga 😂

#FlyMeToTheMoon

ℹ️: www.space.com/space-explor...

What a Final of the Gladiators! Loving this reboot it's such a joy to watch.

Number of AI chatbots ignoring human instructions increasing, study says Exclusive: Research finds sharp rise in models evading safeguards and destroying emails without permission

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Chapau!

"This is not straightforward... and the STFC thing is particularly difficult"

Understatement 😬

A thread with quotes from Lord Vallance and his thoughts on the "STFC thing"

Comic. Planets and Bright Stars Identification Chart. [Bright glowing dots over black background with labels underneath: Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, Sirius, Procyon, Antares, Altair, Betelgeuse, Vega, Polaris]

Planets and Bright Stars

xkcd.com/3219/

Oof, only an ~8% selection rate for JWST proposals (225 out of 2855 proposals!).

Some statistics, which indicate JWST is more than 10:1 oversubscribed (both in terms of hours and proposals):

2,855 proposals requested almost 100,000 hours in Cycle 5, compared to the 8,000 hours available.

254 proposals have been approved

Brace, brace, brace. JWST Cycle 5 emails incoming — prepare yourself for the ceremonial rejection ritual.

The Science, Innovation & Tech committee have written the most amazing letter to DSIT/UKRI/STFC:

"What is clear is that, despite your assertions to the contrary... widespread cuts have been proposed before adequate consultation with those affected was undertaken. This is wholly unacceptable" 💪🔭⚛️🧪

I was expecting this to be a super rare earth element. Not sulphur!

Celebrating Women in Mathematics This paper was motivated by the worldwide May 12 initiative that aims to celebrate, encourage, and inspire women in mathematics. It presents in short how the May 12 initiative has arisen, what are som...

Came across this essay this morning and think it is worth sharing. We can not talk enough about the achievements of all the great women out there!

arxiv.org/abs/2603.09077
Celebrating Women in Mathematics
by Diana T. Stoeva

#math #academicChater #womeninStem #womenInHistory #mathsky

Because “looking at images, not catalogs” is a dying pastime, the paper includes a tutorial on -how- to interpret images of galaxies. Qualitative information alone can get you a surprisingly long way towards a reasonable model, if you’re thinking through the links between morphology and physics.

The Milky Way arcs over and behind this view looking up at Rubin's shiny silver dome toward a starry night sky.

Alerts from NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory have been flowing for about a week...how many have there been?? 🚨

So far, Rubin has generated....drumroll please🥁

~1.7 million world-public alerts!

That's ~1.7 MILLION objects that changed in brightness or position in just seven nights 🤯

🔭🧪

I rather like the Olympics and she won the Gold. It was the uks first trampolining Olympic medal. So it rather stood out.

Bryony Page :)

Rows of people wearing orange lanyards in a House of Commons committee hearing. At the front is Catherine sporting her "I'm about to perform an appendectomy" mask and looking particularly snazzy.

Here is my run-down of today's Science, Information & Technology Committee hearing (House of Commons) where @jonbutterworth.bsky.social @si-wills.bsky.social & I argued for no funding cuts, & Prof. Michele Doughtery explained why they were needed. The public gallery again packed with physicists 🔭👩‍🔬⚛️

@astroroyalscot.bsky.social Well done 👏

What a stunner. I did not expect such a large impact on the wider environment. Wow.