I'm so old, I remember when the road up to Mount Hamilton still passed through a few orchards at the edge of the built-up area.

A collage of fourteen by eight squares containing examples of gravitational lenses. Each example typically comprises a bright centre with smears of stars in an arc or multiple arcs around it as a result of light travelling towards Euclid from distant galaxies being bent and distorted by normal and dark matter in the foreground. In some rare cases the smearing is in a complete ring, creating a so-called Einstein Ring.

Help us hunt for signs of spacetime warping! 🔎

Join Euclid Space Warps on @zooniverse.bsky.social and search for strong gravitational lenses in never-before-seen images from our Dark Universe detective 🕵️ 👉 www.esa.int/Science_Expl...

🔭 🧪 #CitizenScience

Join us at Druid City Brewing Company on April 28th at 7PM to hear Prof. Sam Grunblatt discuss the fate of our solar system! 🌍☀️🚀 More info: astronomyontap.org/event/astron...

Globular cluster Omega Centauri - a ball of thousands of resolved stars, the brighter ones yellowish and the faintest ones bluer.

I'll see your Cen A and raise you this 10m Origin exposure of Omega Centauri 5 degrees further south. (Last night, Mid-South Stargaze event at Mississippi's Rainwater Observatory; 8.8 degrees from the geometric horizon and closer to the treetops). So many stars.

Still waiting on proofs, but it is now officially available in the journal.

doi.org/10.1017/pasa...

Observatory operations life: another email from the Kitt Peak management with "Mountain Lion" in the subject. I learned last time that these do not refer to the MacOS version (and left my car closer to my setup than I had planned).

A piece of lore I passed on at retirement was what it took to get permission for a window air conditioner in the observatory control room (which is not connected to the building air circulation, here in Alabama). It's for the computers, not for observers.

I did the thing for some years blowing up a punching bag emblazoned with my favorite galaxies, trying to explain its limitations. (Some students did connect the redshift with my facial color afterward) ) Then one year I did it once too often and it burst, a rather different demo than I had in mind.

This is because we have NASA Roman "Wide Field Science" funding to work on setting up images to go through @galaxyzoo.org - we hope *very* soon after data from three filters of a bit of sky come down from space. 🔭👩‍🔬

First landing of shuttle Columbia, white orbiter and mirage reflection against tan desert and bluer background mountains, with a small white chase plane just ahead of it.

45 years ago today - I was standing with 500,000 close friends next to a runway at Edwards AFB awaiting Columbia's return from the first Space Shuttle flight. Mirage on the desert floor gave a remarkably good reflection of the orbiter from our vantage point. Started trip w/San Jose L-5 society.

Senior space nerd: with Apollo, all we saw live was none-too-great live TV from helicopters or shipboard relayed through 1970-era satellites. The best-quality images were on film, had to await developing and distribution (and with news cycles, some wasn't publically seen for decades). Yay digital!

I dunno, it appears that your ADS entries beg to differ about spitting in the wind.

Crudely (no standard stars last night), R~15.2. The declination certainly doesn't help from northern sites this flight. It was right where JPL Horizons put it.

Telescopic images of Artemis II. Left, a trail against the background stars. Right, it appears as a small bright spot as the stars trail by in the background when the telescope was set to follow the spacecraft.

The scheduled observer at the SARA remote 0.6m telescope in Chile couldn't use last night, so I spent a little while following Artemis II (range 354,000 km). Left, 2m exposure tracking on stars; right, 1m tracking on the spacecraft. Much brighter than Artemis I, due to more favorable phase angle.

I got a certain amount of feedback for a web collection of ground-based observations of the Apollo moonships en route. I will not be doing an Artemis followup because there are soooo many and it's soooo cool. pages.astronomy.ua.edu/keel/space/a...

Working at an Easter kids' festival for 5 local churches, it all had a theme. High winds meant rocks didn't hold paper down, and signs had to be firmly attached. Then, as I was working the first-aid booth, someone presented for bandaging. Nailed to a tree - stones rolling - spilling of blood...

Bonestell FTW!

Just throwing this out there in case pieces are still around - when a tornado pulled down a 90-foot oak in our yard, I thought to grab a Christmas-tree skirt, wrap over the base, and get a family portrait for that year's cards...

I will always redistribute this, whose analysis was my first five months of "retirement". (Seriously, the joy of lasting long enough to work with JWST data!) Bonus gravitational lens from the elliptical galaxy, obvious within 30 seconds of downloading first image file.

Grainy B&W photograph of the Apollo 15 launch of a Saturn V rocket.

Artemis II launch with brilliant exhaust plumes below the rocket outline and river waves at the bottom.

Moonshots, 1971 and 2026. Grainy home-processed B&W picture of Apollo 15 versus digital image from Artemis II. Dedicated launch photographers on the viewing boat yesterday pronounced the Apollo 15 image "legit". I felt slightly affirmed.

It's true, they are unlikely to merge any time soon. (Правда, ети галактики очень невероятни строитъ сливший систем. Or something like that.)

(starts sniffing around to see whether the HETDEX catalog includes any resolved [O III] interlopers at z<0.1...)

Independently (AFAICT), the Soviet space program came up with nearly the same green as one of their interior colors for spacecraft (somewhere I have a book on the work of Galina Balashova who was behind this).

And now Older Son tells me that rumors point to a genuine Lego HST set with 1500 pieces for this summer. I feel targeted.

I just started the Enterprise itself (after tripping over the box in the den for months), as a treat after acceptance of a manuscript that Took Some Time. (I even branched out and will try one of the lighting kits which Facebook is eager to advertise All The Time).

It's easier to leave the tab open as a reminder?

Every galaxy astronomer's first encounter with a carbon star spectrum: "oh, crap, I broke the spectrograph."

I would pay a premium to fly on an aircraft where the seats do not recline. (At such hypothetical future time as I would think about flying somewhere, that is.)

After data-analysis meeting, took colleagues to see Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville. Was waxing eloquent about heritage from engines of V-1 to Saturn V (displayed next to each other) when it dawned on me I was addressing colleagues from the UK and Germany. Ground failed to open and swallow me.

+ we don't know what the "right" outcome is. Grades (IIRC) must match rankings and can be juggled after comments are written. 80% should obv be done but here ~8% will fit and especially in the middle ranking orders are pure statistical fluctuations.

[LLMs will not fix any of this.]