Just did a double take looking at the size of that echelle grating, whoa

I think astronomers are particularly effective at the use (and acceptance) of pathological scenarios for the purpose of illustration and education.
We don’t mind conjuring impossibly weird planets as what-if scenarios.

I sense that other fields can view pathological examples as distracting.

M.C. Escher's The Picture Gallery shows a highly distorted image of a continuously zoomed image, and the conformal mapping to a plane with infinitely tiled copied of this distorted image.

If you haven’t seen 3Blue1Brown videos yet, you are missing out! His latest one is on M.C. Escher’s picture frame distortion is absolutely breathtaking, using visuals to introduce complex analysis in what feels a very intuitive way. All his videos are excellent and well worth a browse.

A free, cool idea I was excited about at Kepler/K2:
There exists a transformation to make nonstationary stellar variability into stationary. Deep Kernel Learning was the fad at the time, but I’m not sure anyone ever pulled this off successfully. The hope was to make a physics based transformation

Bayesian priors = “priced in”

Deeply heartwarming to see folks in the same offices, Alexa even made me a Cuban cafecito!

I just stopped by UT Austin to return some long lost inventory, and was delighted to see so many familiar faces and hear about the great work going on! 🔭 🪐 my grad school instrumentation memos are actively being used—surreal!

I was about to propose a feature then did YAGNI and stopped, where do I collect my software engineering award.

h/t CTVC Sightline newsletter

China 5 year plan includes “Aim to double non-fossil energy in 10 years”, already plateauing emissions
☀️💨⚡️🔋⚛️🌋

Earl Bellinger: Putting compact objects where they don’t belong...(October 24, 2025) YouTube video by Flatiron Institute

Talk from Earl Bellinger describing black holes in the interior of stars, and observational consequences:

youtu.be/RW0GX36neKM?...

I suppose this channel is rare enough that we’re not likely to see one on a nearby star in our lifetimes, but still it’d be cool. Also we’re not sure this channel exists.

The planets would still have IR, you could do direct imaging on them, even better if they were young, you’d probably want a high mass host star for the planets to be young enough. The BH removes the host star for you, no coronagraph needed

So there’s the prospect of planets that previously had a host star suddenly orbiting a black hole, but without the destructive phase of traditional HR diagram stellar evolution. Dark Planet systems.

Assumes you have some precursor to predict the accretion event timing, probably wouldn’t work out, free fall time is at least comparable to light echo time, etc. but upside bonus if they were eclipsing before the event, resulting BH could lens the planets if geometry is perfect?

New planet detection technique:
Look for stars that disappear entirely (black holes in interior, cf Bellinger) then look for light echo plateaus from the reflected light of planets.
Apparently ~100 M dwarfs have disappeared consistent with this mechanism. You’d have a few light minutes of signal.

Currently reading the Project Hail Mary book and there’s a ton of astrophysics in it—no spoilers but early on there’s infrared spectroscopy, ALMA, and more. Curious to hear what other astronomers think!

For astrometry, you’re right that better knowledge of the PSF yields benefits in the high SNR regime as well, since asymmetries in the PSF shape need to be understood to account for biases in the centroid. Chromatic effects mean the PSF fitting should help in all cases

Good point, I suppose it depends on the goal— for photometry, aperture-based methods give you comparable results to PSF fitting in the high SNR regime. In the low SNR regime, the background noise dominates the aperture based methods, so PSF fitting boosts delivered SNR by weighting the pixels.

Well said

Neat work on precision PSF modeling of Gaia!

Little known fact: we captured Kepler driftscan PSFs during downtime in the K2 mission. PSF modeling is great boon for low SNR science, extended objects, etc.

Good band name, or maybe a softball team composed in part by punk rock astronomers with a fastball

It’s me

Sans serif math in LaTeX is so satisfying. \mathsf{}

Above all it’s just great to hear Dan’s voice, miss that guy

Dan Foreman Mackey: JAX Training YouTube video by Flatiron Institute

youtu.be/yUAZGR9RwPI?...

@benjaminpope.bsky.social it’s mostly live coding with examples of JAX-isms and some new goodies like context managers for float64

Very cool opportunity to make differentiable physics models for EPRV, work with Ben and co, and live in a cool place. Pretty much a dream job, apply!

Still want a JAX for science conference, where all my JAX scientists at

The sheer joy I felt just now discovering that there is a new Dan Foreman Mackey video about JAX.

standing room only for physics?
faith in humanity restored ✨👏