David Wilson
@astrodave2.bsky.social
Astronomer at CU Boulder. I look at small stars with space telescopes. In my spare time I run medium distances, build and paint various tiny plastic people and visit old ships. He/Him
If any exoplanet astronomers need an idea for an April Fools paper, an analysis of this atmosphere could be an... explosive read 🔭 #exoplanet
Jörg Hillebrand@gaghyogi49.bsky.social · 5d agoHere are the space shots that we get of (the original) Sol V and its two moons and the cool planetary graphic with all the basic facts about the planet, as seen in last week's #StarTrekSNW episode "The Griffin Incident".
Co-author paper day! Very happy to contribute to this work led by Mairi O'Brien, pointing Hubble and Swift at some cool binary stars arxiv.org/abs/2607.11320 🔭 lasp.colorado.edu/2026/07/13/h...
Hubble Space Telescope reveals hidden white dwarf stars in four nearby star systems
An international team of astronomers has directly detected four nearby white dwarfs that had remained hidden in binary star systems, though their presence had been posited for decades. The study used ...
lasp.colorado.edu
Co-author paper day! Very happy to contribute to this work led by Mairi O'Brien, pointing Hubble and Swift at some cool binary stars arxiv.org/abs/2607.11320 🔭 lasp.colorado.edu/2026/07/13/h...
Hubble Space Telescope reveals hidden white dwarf stars in four nearby star systems
An international team of astronomers has directly detected four nearby white dwarfs that had remained hidden in binary star systems, though their presence had been posited for decades. The study used ...
lasp.colorado.edu
Well, isn’t this a sight for sore eyes! 😍 Our beloved Hubble appears in this amazing image from one of Vantor's WorldView Legion satellites. It was 36 years ago today that Hubble was launched in the bay of the Space Shuttle Discovery from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Credit: Vantor.
#Artemis II - Photo 2 from yesterdays flyby ECLIPSE. April 6, 2026. Totality, beyond Earth. From lunar orbit, the Moon eclipses the Sun, revealing a view few in human history have ever witnessed. Photo: NASA 🚀🌕🌑
#Artemis II - We have the first image from yesterdays Lunar flyby captured by the crew on Orion EARTHSET. April 6, 2026. Humanity, from the other side. First photo from the far side of the Moon. Captured from Orion as Earth dips beyond the lunar horizon. 🚀🌕🌍
ok one more, for the Mass Effect 1 fans out there, I always consider this to be the Peak of Chill Vibing In Space Music
New HLSP: TESS-3I light curves of comet 3I/ATLAS in Jan 2026. Note: the animation is not astrometrically aligned across frames, so apparent "motion" side-to-side is not the absolute motion of the object. Residuals may be in some frames: these are not outburst events. archive.stsci.edu/hlsp/tess-3i
I'm going to expand this statement to say that astronomers should actually look at their data whatever the format. Yes pipelines and high level science products are great, but you learn a lot from just spending some time exploring the counts-on-pixels images, even for spectroscopy. 🔭
Stacy McGaugh@dudedarkmatter.bsky.social · 5mo agoEnjoying looking through the HST images of ARP galaxies just published by @dalcantonjd.bsky.social et al. It is good for astronomers to actually *look* at galaxies, as the authors specifically note. If only we also read the text… iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...
Barddoniaeth ar gyfer Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Well, today is St David's Day so let me first offer a hearty "Dydd Gwŷl Dewi Sant hapus i chi gyd" (Happy St David's Day to you all). Here is a picture of some daffodils amid the undergrowth in my garden: Over the years, I seem to have established a tradition…
Barddoniaeth ar gyfer Dydd Gŵyl Dewi
Well, today is St David's Day so let me first offer a hearty "Dydd Gwŷl Dewi Sant hapus i chi gyd" (Happy St David's Day to you all). Here is a picture of some daffodils amid the undergrowth in my garden: Over the years, I seem to have established a tradition of posting a bit of poetry to mark this special day for Wales and the Welsh and given current events I chose this one which I have posted before, about 9 years ago.
telescoper.blog
Happy No Sleep Ever Again Day to all the transient astronomers out there! 🔭
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌@chanda.blacksky.app · 5mo ago"NSF-DOE Rubin issued 800,000 alerts the night of Feb. 24. The alerts called scientists' attention to new asteroids, exploding stars and other changes in the night sky. This milestone marks the launch of a system expected to eventually produce up to 7 million alerts per night." 🔭🧪
"NSF-DOE Rubin issued 800,000 alerts the night of Feb. 24. The alerts called scientists' attention to new asteroids, exploding stars and other changes in the night sky. This milestone marks the launch of a system expected to eventually produce up to 7 million alerts per night." 🔭🧪
NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory launches real-time discovery machine for monitoring the night sky
The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, has released its first alerts documenting…
nsf.gov
Super proud of my brilliant Honours student @katelynsmith.bsky.social with her first-author debut on arXiv today: arxiv.org/abs/2602.18085 Europeans - look out for her starting her PhD in Amsterdam!
The attempted polarity reversal and evolving magnetic environment of AD Leo
In the past two decades, the observed large-scale magnetic field of the active M dwarf star AD Leo has evolved from strongly to mildly negative, raising a suspicion that it might switch polarity. Alth...
arxiv.org
Saw Jupiter with my eyes through a 3.5 m telescope last night, was pretty good 🔭
Just a reminder that I'm hiring! Looking for an engineer/research for some fun projects (some building! some designing!) Come build spectrographs at UW.
Research Scientist/Engineer 2 (E S UAW Research)
Job Description The University of Washington (UW) Astronomy Department has an outstanding opportunity for a researcher who will have responsibilities in the design, development, construction, and test...
wd5.myworkdaysite.com
Astronomers: highly recommend this thoughtful opinion piece by @hogg.bsky.social on how to think about our field in light of the development of large language models. whether you agree with him or not it’s vital to discuss the principles behind our science. 🔭 arxiv.org/abs/2602.10181
Why do we do astrophysics?
At time of writing, large language models (LLMs) are beginning to obtain the ability to design, execute, write up, and referee scientific projects on the data-science side of astrophysics. What implic...
arxiv.org
omg everybody go draw a horse this is what the internet was made for gradient.horse
gradient.horse
Draw a horse, watch it run!
gradient.horse
The Royal Astronomical Society is gravely concerned at the drastic cuts to support for UK astronomy outlined by the Science and Technology Facilities Council. Read our statement 👉 ras.ac.uk/news-and-pre...
Proposed budget cuts a catastrophe for UK astronomy
The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) is gravely concerned at the drastic cuts to support for UK astronomy outlined by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (...
ras.ac.uk
*cough* A little bit of extra info to add here: There's only one transit, so the true period is unknown. It could be anywhere between 300 and 550 days. This is an exciting candidate! But (a) we don't know if it's real, and (b) we don't know what its temperature is if it IS real.
Elise Cutts@elisecutts.bsky.social · 6mo agoNew planet just dropped and it 1) is almost exactly Earth-sized 2) has a year that's almost exactly 1 Earth year. 3) orbits a star that is not a 💢temperamental little shit M-dwarf 💢but is instead a 🧡 good orange boi 🧡 Me for @science.org based on results presented at #RockyWorlds4: 🔭🧪
Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin’s autobiography is just amazing. Every astronomer should read it. Here she is talking about her memories of Annie Jump Cannon.
Beautiful graphic of the day (because that should be a thing: Our Solar System By my data hero Eleanor Lutz
And we are up on arXiv! arxiv.org/abs/2601.01628 🔭
The MUSCLES Extension for Atmospheric Transmission Spectroscopy: Spectral energy distributions for 20 exoplanet host stars that JWST observed in Cycle 1
Correctly interpreting JWST spectra of close-in exoplanets requires a measurement of the X-ray and ultraviolet light that the planets receive from their host stars. Here we provide spectral energy dis...
arxiv.org
David Wilson@astrodave2.bsky.social · 7mo agoYay early Christmas present!!! All these stars will soon be yours 🔭
![Comic. [Over dark background, a five-pointed pentagram-style star orbits around a white circle with a smaller orbit.] [caption] Space news: Astronomers have found the first known system with a main-sequence star orbited by a five-pointed one.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:cz73r7iyiqn26upot4jtjdhk/bafkreigbbhzy2dqnafyqqba26sgh7vjzdu2mvsczyiapveerp2eoru6gum)
