Played Ada’s Dream this weekend. It’s a heavy board game that inhabits the world of Ada Lovelace.
You can give lectures at the Royal Astronomical Society and the door even looks familiar.
Such a love letter to the history of science.
🔭🧪⚛️
Image: Meeple Mountain
While this may look like the Moon, it’s actually Mercury.
In this enhanced colour view, young crater rays appear light blue or white.
Medium and dark blue areas are opaque crust minerals.
Tan areas are plains formed by the eruption of lava.
#astronomy
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Image: MESSENGER
The Space Art of Étienne Trouvelot now sits in my Museum
Of Cosmic Curiosities.
It’s a growing collection of strange, profound artefacts from the history of astronomy.
museum.colinstuart.net
The Great Comet of 1881 & Jupiter
A solar eclipse
With all the Moon mania on the back of Artemis II, here’s one of my favourite pieces of lunar art.
It’s from the 19th century artist Étienne Trouvelot, who used the chromolithography technique.
There’s more of his artwork in the 🧵 below
#astronomy 🧪
Astronomer Edwin Brant Frost’s 10 yr old son demanded pocket money, which he used to buy two sheep with a friend.
The animals grazed near the Yerkes Observatory & the entrepreneurial kids sold the wool for profit.
That was until the sheep ate the new bathing suit of Dr Crump.
#astronomy #history
Poor Galileo, forced to rat
Before the Inquisition,
E pur si muove was the pat
He gave them in addition:
He meant, whate'er you think you prove,
The Earth must go its way, sirs;
Spite of your teeth I'll make it move,
For I'll drink my bottle a day, sirs!
Copernicus, that learned wight,
The glory of his nation,
With draughts of wine refreshed his sight,
And saw the Earth's rotation
Each planet then its orb described,
The Moon got under way, sir;
These truths from nature he imbibed
For he drank his bottle a day, sir!
When Ptolemy, now long ago,
Believed the Earth stood still, sir,
He never would have blundered so,
Had he but drunk his fill, sir:
He'd then have felt it circulate,
And would’ve learnt to say, sir,
The true way to investigate
Is to drink your bottle a day, sir!
Astronomer’s Drinking Song 1800
🧪⚛️🔭
A starspot on Zeta Andromedae.
That’s a surface feature on a star 181 light years away.
#astronomy
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Image: Roettenbacher et al
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The Martian Morse Code Wheels now sit in my Museum of Cosmic Curiosities, a collection of strange and profound objects from the history of astronomy and space exploration.
museum.colinstuart.net
This Easter, here’s an Easter egg straight from NASA.
The tire treads of the Curiosity rover spell out JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) in Morse code.
🧵(1/2)
#astronomy 🧪
A cosmic rainbow of polarised zodiacal light.
It’s faint light scattered off solar system dust.
Hue indicates direction and saturation indicates degree of polarisation.
Look closely and you can even see The Pleiades just above centre.
#astronomy 🧪 ⚛️
Image: NASA/SwRI
Yes, they are widely available to buy.
Pallasites are arguably the most beautiful of all meteorites.
Large crystals of olivine suspended in a metal matrix gives a stained glass window effect.
#astronomy
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Image: Doug Bowman
A false colour, composite image of the Moon taken by the Galileo spacecraft.
Red = lunar highlands
Blue to orange = volcanic lava flows (blue contains more titanium than orange)
Purple = pyroclastic deposits formed by explosive volcanic eruptions
#astronomy 🧪
Image: NASA/JPL
From the delay (or early arrival) of predicted moon transits and eclipses compared to a reference location you could work out far you were from that location.
Although I believe the chair was never built and it’s a tricky method to accurately execute on a swaying ship.
A marine chair designed for the express purpose of observing Jupiter and its moons while on a ship.
Designed in 1757 by Christian Kratzenstein, the purpose was to help determine the ship’s longitude.
#astronomy
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Still, there’s something hard to beat about an astronaut sneaking his own name into the night sky.
Navi/Tiansi now sits in my Museum of Cosmic Curiosities, a growing collection of strange and profound objects from the history of astronomy.
museum.colinstuart.net
(5/6)
Eventually, the International Astronomical Union stepped in to formalise things.
In 2025, the star finally received an official name: Tiansi.
In Chinese astronomy, it refers to the horses pulling a celestial chariot (part of a much older sky tradition).
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Gus Grissom called it Navi, partly because he used the star for navigation during space missions.
But there was also a secret.
It was his middle name - Ivan - spelled backwards.
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For years, it went by an unofficial name: Navi.
But that wasn’t based on an ancient myth.
It came from astronaut Gus Grissom.
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It sits in the constellation of Cassiopeia - the distinctive ‘W’ in the northern sky.
And it’s not some faint background star.
It’s the one right in the middle.
Some star names are short, like Vega or Rigel.
Others are beautiful tongue twisters, like Zubenelgenubi or Shurnarkabtishashutu.
And yet, one bright star had no official name until very recently.
This is the story of the star with no name.
🧵 (1/6)
#astronomy 🧪⚛️
Till Credner / AlltheSky.com
False colour image of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io.
The yellow shows sulphur plumes.
It’s the most volcanically active place in the solar system.
#astronomy 🧪
Image: ALMA (ESO/ NAOJ/ NRAO)/ I. de Pater et al./ NRAO/ AUI NSF/ S. Dagnello/ NASA/ ESA/ UC Berkeley.
“The King of Siam, an honourary member, reported as dead, is still alive”
Spotted in an old @royalastrosoc.bsky.social paper.
#astronomy 🧪
Mars’s moon Phobos set against the Red Planet.
At an average diameter of just 22km across, it is smaller than a city.
(Although I always say it looks like a giant space potato).
#astronomy 🧪
Image: Mars Express
