RE: https://indieweb.social/@xkcdbot/117004831060440385 As someone who works on the Rubin Observatory, I can confirm that it would in fact be possible to leave the blinds up and the lights up in the kitchen 🙂.

Downtown Boston from the Boston University Campus.

Hey professional #astrodon folks! A pretty unique chance to become my colleague at #ESA - working as a project scientist on our newly adopted galactic archaeology mission Arrakihs: Job details: https://jobs.esa.int/job/Noordwijk-Project-Scientist/1414232033/ More about Arrakihs […]

In about 2013 I started to focus my research program on cosmology and began working on the Rubin Observatory. I spent 2022 and 2024 living in Chile working on commissioning the telescope. Today we officially started our ten year survey. It’s a great day! […]

#SilentSunday

Grateful to be featured in this lovely story! www.newsobserver.com/news/local/a...

Duke scientist seeks answers to universe’s biggest mysteries with new telescope

A new telescope atop a mountain in Chile will help scientists look back to when the universe had just begun.

newsobserver.com

Any astronomers looking for a wild new job? I got a message from an ecologist in Belgium today, and he's looking for a postdoc with experience in photometry to work on analysis of all-sky imagery for an experiment on the impact of #LightPollution on birds. This is not a job offer! He would […]

trinity.duke.edu/news/new-chi...

New Chilean Telescope Opens a Window on the Early Universe

Look to your left: red dirt and rocks. Look to your right: red dirt and rocks. The sky? Painfully clear. The air? Hard to breathe.

trinity.duke.edu

"Annotating a 1934 photographic glass plate by hand, Harvard University “computer” Muriel Mussells Seyfert found 431 galaxies within the dashed red circle marking the center of the Coma Cluster." #histsci #astronomy

#SilentSunday

RE: https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116447067337351283 Also, this was the paper led by a graduate student working with me published in @OJ_Astro last month for his Ph.D thesis. In this work we study how to combine data from the Rubin Observatory and the Roman Space telescope to extend […]

Open Journal of Astrophysics@oj-astro.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy · 4mo ago

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "IRMaGiC: Extending Luminous Red Galaxy Selection into the Infrared with Joint Rubin Observatory’s Large Survey of Space Time and Roman’s High Latitude Imaging Survey" by Zhiyuan Guo & Chris. W. Walter (Duke U., USA) and Eli S. Rykoff […]

RE: https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/116617293753093751 This paper (the second in the last last few weeks I have published in @OJ_Astro) combines my two research directions and history. We study how to follow up a neutrino alarm from underground Super-Kamiokande neutrino experiment with the […]

Open Journal of Astrophysics@oj-astro.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy · 3mo ago

New Publlication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "Uncovering the Next Galactic Supernova with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory" by John Banovetz (Lawrence Berkeley Lab., USA), Claire-Alice Hebert & Peter B. Denton (Brookhaven National Lab., USA) Dan Scolnic (Duke U., USA) Anze Slosar […]

It was fun to see this xkcd this morning since I happen to be in Japan at a Super-Kamiokande collaboration meeting and 30th year anniversary celebration. There is a very famous historical image of Ray Davis swimming in the water tank around the chlorine tank […] [Original post on fediscience.org]

Yesterday, I visited the small Shitamachi Museum in Ueno Park in Tokyo. It tells the history of the old neighborhood near the park and was quiet interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shitamachi_Museum I saw this in a display of household items, and had […] [Original post on fediscience.org]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/116528635507100918 Yes, satellites reflecting sunlight are incredibly bright, and there are a lot of them. Ask any astronomer about this and you'll get a rant and a half.

New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics: "IRMaGiC: Extending Luminous Red Galaxy Selection into the Infrared with Joint Rubin Observatory’s Large Survey of Space Time and Roman’s High Latitude Imaging Survey" by Zhiyuan Guo & Chris. W. Walter (Duke U., USA) and Eli S. Rykoff […]

Super-Kamiokande Collaboration's 1998 PRL "Evidence for oscillation of atmospheric neutrinos" inspirehep.net/literature/4... reaches 9,000 citations.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@kjhealy/116279697138121560 This post by @kjhealy was quite interesting. It also made me think of https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/our-open-plan-office-failed-so-were-moving-to-a-towering-panopticon If you have never seen it.

For some reason, I didn't see this anywhere in my feed yesterday. Since we all could use this, I'm fixing that here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCbuRA_D3KU

@franco_vazza I enjoyed the pictures of the trees with flowers in Bologna. Here is a view from the Duke campus yesterday.

I’m excited to be talking about the Big Bang and our new telescopes at the Haw River Taproom in Carrborro, NC on Feb 3! moreheadplanetarium.org/calendar/car...

I have never seen the word "perihelion" in a weather warning before! Wow. I'm totally saving this to show my students why basic astro 101 is very practical sometimes (...ok maybe the prairies do not have a tidal flooding problem...but... perihelion!!)

YOUR CLAM YEAR IN REVIEW - There are over ten thousand known species of clams and tens of thousands more undescribed. Please do your part and find a few species next year. - Cultured bivalves alone help remove over 49,000 tons of nitrogen from our waterways every year, along with other […]

Medium sized embossed monoprint #art #printmaking #abstractart

Wow. This is spectacular. A drone flight video in HD to the top of the Matterhorn in the Alps. With several groups of climbers being passed along the way. I felt a bit queasy in bits. I’m not good with heights. 8-minute video: https://youtu.be/DdzT9iljYdg #Geology #Mountains

Astrophotographer snaps 'absolutely preposterous' photo of skydiver 'falling' past the sun's surface | Live Science This photo is breaking my brain. 🤯 https://www.livescience.com/space/the-sun/astrophotographer-snaps-absolutely-preposterous-photo-of-skydiver-falling-past-the-suns-surface

Astrophotographer snaps 'absolutely preposterous' photo of skydiver 'falling' past the sun's surface

Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy has snapped a striking shot of a skydiving YouTuber perfectly aligned with the fiery surface of the sun. The unlikely image, dubbed "The Fall of Icarus," required meticulous planning to pull off.

livescience.com

Thrilled to join the Simons Observatory with Duke University as a member institution! @simonsobservatory.org today.duke.edu/2025/10/capt...

Capturing the Big Bang’s Afterglow | Duke Today

today.duke.edu

I cannot visit @esoastronomy HQ without photographing and posting about this video game box. It is not just a bit of astronomy themed retro box art, there is an actual retro game to go with it too. It was written for the Atari 2600 but can also be played online […] [Original post on aus.social]

You remember the iconic picture of a black hole from the @ehtelescope? Now there are three - a mini-movie so to speak. The structure of magnetic fields changes, the brightness wobbles, but the ring remains rock solid. That seals the case for it being a black […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

This article has a really nice explanation of how astronomical images that you see get assigned their colors, along with info on some of the choices we make related to this in the Rubin Observatory. https://spie.org/news/photonics-focus/sept-oct-2025/coloring-astronomy

Astro-color alchemists

Astronomers have a method for colorizing grayscale images from various space- and groundbased observatories.

spie.org