That’s Australia silhouetted against the glare!

NASA alt text: Earthset captured through the Orion spacecraft window at 6:41 p.m. EDT, April 6, 2026, during the Artemis II crew’s flyby of the Moon. A muted blue Earth with bright white clouds sets behind the cratered lunar surface. The dark portion of Earth is experiencing nighttime. On Earth’s day side, swirling clouds are visible over the Australia and Oceania region. In the foreground, Ohm crater has terraced edges and a flat floor interrupted by central peaks. Central peaks form in complex craters when the lunar surface, liquefied on impact, splashes upwards during the crater’s formation.

🔭 Earthset

Image Credit: NASA

Text: Keighley Rockcliffe (NASA GSFC, UMBC CSST, CRESST II)

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The Artemis II crew just reported several impact flashes—explosions from hypervelocity impacts of meteoroids with the Moon—during the solar eclipse.

We make a big effort to see a handful of these from Earth with telescopes.

That astronauts flying by the Moon saw >4 in tens of minutes is AWESOME.

Integrity made its closest approach to the Moon, altitude 6543 km, at 2300:46 UTC Apr 6. Its furthest distance from Earth, 413149 km from the geocenter was at 2302:51 UTC.

A tiny crescent Earth slides behind the Moon on the camera feed from the Integrity spacecraft.

NBD, just some humans in a spaceship watching the crescent Earth slip behind the Moon. #Artemis

Screenshot of LinkedIn post from ARC saying that DP27 EOI outcomes will be released on RMS on the 26th Feb 2026.

The ARC have said (on LinkedIn) they will release outcomes for Discovery Projects Expressions of Interest (2027) tomorrow👇

Big if true!!
An MSP in close orbit around Sagittarius A* would lead to some incredible tests of relativity

Aurora appearing as a hazy green band with hints of pinky-purple streaks above it

Person posing with arms outstretched in front of the aurora

Intense aurora with bright green horizontal streaks below pink and purple pillars of light

Pink pillars of light extending up from the horizon

Incredible display of the Aurora Australis on Jan 20. Never thought I’d get to see the auroral oval this close up from Melbourne!

Li et al. monitored a repeating fast radio burst (FRB). They identify a transient excursion of its rotation measure (RM), which increases by orders of magnitude for 2 weeks. Possible causes include a coronal mass ejection from a binary companion star. ☄️ #radioastro
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Sleepy 😴

Aaaaand the papers are live on the Open Journal of Astrophysics!!

#RadioAstronomy

Diagram of a pulsar with different regions of interest highlighted

Cross-sectional cutaway of a pulsar, with different layers and their composition highlighted.

And of course, this meant flexing my Adobe Illustrator skills! Here’s a couple nice graphics that I put together for the SKA pulsar magnetospheres and interiors papers 😁

#RadioAstronomy

I was involved in 3/12 of the updates

- Magnetospheres: arxiv.org/abs/2512.16157
- Testing gravity: arxiv.org/abs/2512.16161
- Interiors (I helped out with coordinating this one): arxiv.org/abs/2512.16162

Pulsar Science with the SKA Observatory The large instantaneous sensitivity, a wide frequency coverage and flexible observation modes with large number of beams in the sky are the main features of the SKA observatory's two telescopes, the S...

It’s SKA Pulsar Day!!

It’s been more than a decade since the previous science case for the SKA was published. So a bunch of us pulsar astronomers put together an update!

🔭☄️

arxiv.org/abs/2512.16152

No worries!

I’m still within 5 years post-PhD, so not eligible to apply for a Future at the moment.

Yep! I’m an ECR and have been asked to review a pair of Future Fellowships.

DECRA success rate is the lowest in 14 years, since 2012 (1st year the scheme ran).

What a pathetic system we have for supporting new ideas, new people…

DE26: 13.1%
25: 17.9
24: 19.6
23: 15.0
22: 19.7
21: 17.1
20: 16.0
19: 17.2
18: 16.3
17: 16.7
16: 16.4
15: 14.3
14: 13.6
13: 15.6
12: 12.8

Geeze. Surely you know you’ve stuffed up when your former science minister, whom *allegedly* despised Australia’s involvement in the SKA, is grilling your parties lack of support for science funding and cuts to the national science agency.

Talk by Wu Jiang (SHAO) showing 2 new 110–120-meter radio telescopes under construction.

China is investing big in #RadioAstronomy.

#EAVN25 🧪🔭📡

Sadly a DECRA can only purchase up to 1/3rd of a house in Sydney, let alone a giant radio telescope…

Or just refurbished the one already there!

Does the telescope actually come with the land? And the buyer could (in theory) do whatever they want with the telescope?

Could tell the antennas were all pointed at the same spot and that data was streaming easily enough!

There was indeed a large cat. But only a single antenna…

Image of a computer screen filled with windows that show various telescope diagnostics and pictures of where they are pointed.

What babysitting a telescope the size of Australia looks like #RadioAstronomy

An institute or grant not budgeting for APCs is apparently a legitimate reason to ask RAS for a fee waiver!
I asked for one during a brief period between MNRAS going gold open access and my institution making a deal with them, and it was granted

And finally, some pulsars live in unusual locations.

Like this millisecond pulsar that I helped find in the central region of our Galaxy! And is embedded in a giant glowing filament of radio light!!

doi.org/10.3847/2041...

The dynamic magnetosphere of Swift J1818.0–1607 ABSTRACT. Radio-loud magnetars display a wide variety of radio-pulse phenomenology seldom seen among the population of rotation-powered pulsars. Spectropol

Some neutron stars have extremely powerful magnetic field and do all sorts of whacky things. Like emitting beams fast radio bursts 💥

Or behave in totally unexpected ways: doi.org/10.1093/mnra...

And imprint their magnetic fields on the emitted radio waves: doi.org/10.1038/s415...

There’s also a unique “double pulsar” that has provided an extremely powerful tool for testing relativity: www.aanda.org/articles/aa/...

And teaching us about what goes on in the magnetic fields of neutron stars: doi.org/10.1093/mnra...