Cool to see so many #heliophysics missions participating in the tracking of Comet C/2026 A1 (MAPS). It's a shame it didn't survive. The coronagraph movies are pretty awesome, showing the approach and the departure (as a disintegrated puff of material newly entrained in the solar wind). 🧪☀️🛰️🔭🪐☄️
Incidentally, I saw this post because you tagged #SpaceWeather, so the Heliophysics feed picked it up. In case you aren't familiar, here's a link!
This is very cool! Interesting new driver for better CME arrival-time forecasting.
IKR? PDL::Graphics::Gnuplot at least wrapped the madness, and (did I mention?) didn't snort up every last bit of memory in the system like matplotlib does.
Haha, that works until you want to render 1500+ frames and suddenly your laptop's extra TB of disk space is full of #matplotlib 's ram-vomit.
Man oh man, #matplotlib sucks at memory management. PDL::Graphics::Gnuplot was an unholy terror to write, but it at least it didn't hork up memory like a rabid weasel. Currently leaking 50MB per plot I render to a file -- apparently because I had the audacity to want a colorbar.
PUNCH-7 meeting logo is built around flowers observed by the PUNCH team around launch time. The meeting will be in Boulder, Colorado from 12-14 May 2026.
Time to register for PUNCH-7, if you haven't! You won't want to miss this one if you're a #heliophysicist. PUNCH data are turning out to be spectacular. (More on that soon). ☀️
This is a really neat result – the #UCSD group are using PUNCH data to drive 3-D models of the entire solar wind flow. Jackson (UCSD Co-I on #PUNCH) invented this field in the early 1980s, using a spinning photometer to make "images" of CMEs. Amazing that we get to work with him today! ☀️🧪🔭🛰️
How did *I* miss that @bbl-astrophyscs.bsky.social is on here‽‽
Öffentliche Vortragsreihe "Im Feuerwerk der Sonne" Do., 16. April 2026, 19 Uhr Dr. Volker Bothmer (Universität Göttingen) Gefahren von Weltraumwetter für unsere moderne Infrastruktur
DON’T MISS: next lecture in our lecture series “Im Feuerwerk der Sonne” on April 16th, 7 PM. Volker Bothmer from
@unigoettingen
will speak about the effects of dangerous #SpaceWeather on terrestrial infrastructure. In German. More here: www.mps.mpg.de/im-feuerwerk... ☀️🌍🔭
@thegoecampus
Here's a fun (for me) overview talk I gave last month, about making the invisible solar wind visible with PUNCH. Thanks to @swri.org for hosting! It was a great time. ☀️🛰️🧪🔭⚛️🚀
Wow! That was a fun one to write.
Craig DeForest gives two-thumbs-up, hoping for clear skies on 8-April-2024, in preparation for a total solar eclipse as seen in the Cotton Bowl - with a special free-admission science program organized by NOAA.
This was good day, two years ago. We got to see the solar corona, and an enormous arch prominence! @astronamir.bsky.social and @dbseaton.bsky.social organized CATE, a huge array of telescopes that captured the eclipse across North America. One of the sites was right there in the Cotton Bowl. ☀️🧪🔭
Screen snap of a Facebook post shows PUNCH mission data being used to track Comet MAPS.
Nice to see PUNCH (@punch-mission.bsky.social) getting used to track MAPS. The next day or two will be fateful -- will MAPS survive its perihelion on Saturday? ☀️🛰️🧪🔭https://www.facebook.com/share/p/171r4kMk32/
Space weather is a real threat for lunar astronauts. Apollo crews reported flashes of light that were attributed to Cherenkov radiation in their eyeballs, from passage of solar particles. A solar flare or CME passage could have sickened or killed any of the crews. Good forecasting is essential. ☀️🛰️
Graphic design demo shows how font size and highlighting guides the eye.
Thinking about poster presentations today in our weekly group meeting. Remember to use white space, font size, and graphic design to draw people in. This oldie-but-goodie is a nice reminder of that. 🧪
This is sort of a big deal. The Alfvén surface is a theoretical surface (sort of a hydrodynamic "event horizon") and it sets the outer boundary of the solar corona. Mapping it tells us about everything from the solar cycle to how the interplanetary magnetic field is regulated. ☀️🧪
Nope! :-D
Pretty sure an 80kg man is still 80kg on mars.
WFM. You have my email info I think. If not DM me and we can set it up.
I'd be glad to do it - I think we've talked about that in the past. Glad to see that star-river is, er, flowing!
Thanks for keeping this visible, @solarshea.bsky.social ! Dismantling NCAR would be yet another terrible blow to the science infrastructure that made this nation great. 🧪☀️
The Falcon 9 rocket lifts off shortly after sunset on 11-Mar-2025, just after 7pm California time, carrying four PUNCH satellites and the SPHEREx mission to Sun-synchronous polar orbit.
Happy birthday, @punch-mission.bsky.social! One year (minus two hours) ago as I post, this (pic) happened in California. 40 min later, the 4 PUNCH satellites deployed over Africa. Since then, we've downlinked ~1.5 million images of space – and changed the way humanity sees our environment. ☀️🛰️🧪🔭
Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS never got closer than about 2 AU from Earth. Debris fragments seen in Earth's atmosphere are far more likely to be from Starlink, which is 0.0000034 AU from Earth.
Of course, I hope your Mar 11 and Mar 12 are great too!
On this special day...
Funny how odd corners of the language pop up from time to time. Today I was reminded that at least a dozen English words (beak, peak, peck, peek, pica, picante, pick, picket, [mag]pie, pike, pique, and poke) all derive from the same original root meaning "pointy". #etymology
Craig DeForest removes a giant red tie he is wearing. The tie reads "REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT". The photo was taken a few days before the launch of the four PUNCH spacecraft into low Earth orbit, on a Falcon 9 rocket.
This was a year ago. A week after that, we launched PUNCH! 🛰️🔭☀️
Craig DeForest sits in the operators’ chair in front of the operating console at the Reed Research Reactor.
This week I visited Reed College, my alma mater from the 1980s. Highlights included dinner with the physics department (including Mary James and David Griffiths) and touring my old haunts at the Reed Research Reactor. Wonderful department - highly recommended. ⚛️🎢🧐
Title bar of "Polarization Diagnostics Applied to Coronal Mass Ejeections and the Background Solar Wind", a newly published paper in the journal Solar Physics
<thud>! Another PUNCH paper dropped today! Congratulations to Sarah Gibson on this omnibus theoretical treatment of polarization in solar wind structures. Given the simplicity of the Thomson scattering mechanism, it's pretty amazing how deep the rabbit hole can go. 🧪☀️⚛️🔭🛰️
bit.ly/4qT9Kvs