Sarah Watson
@sarahrosewatson.bsky.social
Final year PhD student at Uni of Reading. Studying solar wind interactions with minor planetary bodies☀️☄️
Very lucky to have been in Valencia during the total solar eclipse last week. Managed to capture this time lapse leading up to totality with my telescope! You get a quick glimpse of totality before the telescope tracking got very confused as to where the Sun had gone!
Testing the telescope for Wednesday! ☀️😎(Featuring some very dry grass in Reading)
Congratulations to the wonderful @sarahrosewatson.bsky.social who today successfully defended her PhD to become #DrWatson! Sarah has been studying how #solarwind affects #comets so her friends even baked a suitably cosmic cake to celebrate.
We're finishing up the rollout of Version 0j of the #PUNCH data, and several very cool science papers are in progress. Here's a very cool result on #Comet #Lemmon and the #solarwind! 🔭☀️🛰️🧪
NASA’s Illuminate: Sun Rips Comet’s Tail in Half
YouTube video by NASA Goddard
youtube.com
A whole days worth of background reading to write just one line of my thesis. Not sure if that's productive or not🙃
PUNCH @punch-mission.bsky.social found out we are good at comet tracking, even as we calibrate/refine our solar wind imaging pipeline. In the last 3 months, we've tracked 3 notable comets with images every 4 min, around the clock: SWAN, Atlas, and Lemmon. PUNCH data are free to get and use. ☀️🛰️🧪🔭
NASA's PUNCH Tracks Comet Discovered by SOHO Spacecraft - NASA Science
From August to October, NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission tracked comet 2025 R2 (SWAN) — one of the thousands of comets
science.nasa.gov
Excited for this! The comet may cross the heliospheric current sheet, which can affect the tail of a comet, so will be interesting to see if we see any evidence of this.😍☄️
Jonathan O'Callaghan@astrojonny.bsky.social · 12mo agoInterstellar comet 3I/Atlas is flying past Mars today. Might get some cool views! skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-ne...
Thought I would go say hi to the thing that is currently providing me with content for my PhD thesis ☀️😍
One of my favourite stories I’ve written this year. A third known interstellar object is flying through our solar system right now. What are the 7 biggest questions we want to answer about it? Story by me in @sciam.bsky.social www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-...
New Interstellar Object Is Full of Mysteries. Here’s What Scientists Most Want to Learn
Scientists are racing to learn as much as possible about the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS before it fades from view forever
scientificamerican.com
LOOK AT THE FUZZY LITTLE COMET
Michele Bannister@astrokiwi.bsky.social · last yr.So, what do these observations from @vrubinobs.bsky.social show us about 3I/ATLAS? Well, from as early as June 21, ten days prior to discovery and the earliest that any large-aperture telescope has imagery — it's a comet. The July 3 stack shows it really clearly
A GIF of my images of the eclipse this weekend, using the SeeStar telescope! ☀️🌕 😍(The most spectacular thing about it being that there were no clouds in Reading throughout!!)
Check out my recent paper, just published in ApJ! ☄️
Mathew Owens@mathewjowens.bsky.social · last yr.@sarahrosewatson.bsky.social has just published a nice study of how comet tail disconnections are associated with particular structures in the solar wind (the heliospheric current sheet). And how data assimilation enables us to better forecast these structures. iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...
Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) spotted in full glory by #SolarOrbiter. The #comet was observed with the SoloHI instrument from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. The encounter happened on 14-25 January, while Solar Orbiter was heading toward #Venus and the comet coincidentally swung by the #Sun. 🔭 🧪