Excited to have my latest paper up on arxiv: AGN Reverberation Mapping with LITMUS: Fundamental Limits on lag Recovery Rates! This is a full Bayesian re-analysis of the OzDES Reverberation mapping sample, measuring dozens of new supermassive black hole masses arxiv.org/abs/2608.01163

Having a great time and learning a lot at a final Harley Wood school of astronomy for my PhD! Thanks to all the organisers, speakers, and the Kioloa campus

Thank you very much to Mansfield State High for inviting me to talk in their Meet a Scientist program yesterday! Thanks in particular to the enthusiastic student who wanted to know what would happen if you sat perfectly between two black holes for giving me the chance to talk about Lagrange points.

Had so much fun giving my @pintofscienceau.bsky.social talk on gravitational waves at @brewdogofficial.bsky.social in fortitude valley tonight. Thanks to the organisers, attendees, and my support crew of friends and family. For you bluesky followers, I hope to have a video or script on my blog soon

It's my opinion that the Australian Labor government is making a huge mistake, curtailing current and future students by not going through with ESO membership after 2027 -- literally closing our eyes to the Universe! Check out some words by me in my latest Astrobites article:

Astrobites@astrobites.bsky.social · 4mo ago

From Ryan White @astroryan.bsky.social and Jayde Willingham @jaydewst.bsky.social : Literally and figuratively, Australia is closing its eyes to the future of astronomy. Where does that leave its next generation of students? ⚛️ 🔭 ☄️ 🧪 astrobites.org/2026/05/01/a...

From Ryan White @astroryan.bsky.social and Jayde Willingham @jaydewst.bsky.social : Literally and figuratively, Australia is closing its eyes to the future of astronomy. Where does that leave its next generation of students? ⚛️ 🔭 ☄️ 🧪 astrobites.org/2026/05/01/a...

Australia is closing its Very Large eyes to the Universe

Literally and figuratively, Australia is closing its eyes to the future of astronomy. Where does that leave its next generation of students?

astrobites.org

www.facebook.com/reel/1921250... Thanks to @astrokirsten.bsky.social for letting me talk about my fun reverberation mapping work! Exciting new work coming out soon in this field so watch this space

OzDES Reverberation Mapping of Active Galactic Nuclei: Final Data Release, Black-Hole Mass Results, & Scaling Relations. H. McDougall et. al. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01261

Every wondered how we know that supermassive black holes are so supermassive? Well one trick is to watch how light echoes around them, using "reverberations" to map how big they are. In my latest paper I close out the Australian Dark Energy Survey (OzDES) to measure the masses of hundreds of SMBH.

Importance Sampling (recycling posterior samples) has a reputation as crude brute force, but this underappreciated method can be a surprisingly powerful tool in many practical cases. Find my new article about the importance of importance sampling here: 🔭 hughmcdougall.github.io/blog/03_stat...

Call me old fashioned but sometimes my python IDE questions my grammar choices and frankly I think it should mind its own business

Everytime I read LVK my brain tells me it stands for Ligo Virgo Kirgo 🔭

🔭 Excited to be starting my 3 month visiting research placement at @monashastro.bsky.social working on some numerical specifics in GW population fitting!

🔭 It's called bluesky because of Rayleigh Scattering.

🔭 "I don't know why so many grad students have imposter syndrome. Where does the fear of failure come from?" Meanwhile, in the arXiv submission form:

Watch the solar plasma curve along magnetic field lines like iron filings near a bar magnet. #stellarastro 🧪🔭 This work was funded in part by NSF.

Amazing! Would love to see coronal rain on an AGN disk in this level of detail! nso.edu/press-releas...

You might have heard of the cool chaotic patterns you get from the logistic map, including the islands of stability that appear at certain values of 'r'. Here's a fun animation of a different recursion relation that bounds the output as we change the itteration gain, wrapped around a polar axis.

Wild that Adobe's forced AI features means that you can open a program called "pdf reader", and then be inflicted with a popup asking if you'd like to not read a pdf

🔭 You've got two sets of data: can you combine them, or are the in tension? How do you know? Answer: the Bayesian suspiciousness statistic! This blog (+examples) shows how you can consistently tell if two data sets are in tension with a full Bayes approach! hughmcdougall.github.io/blog/03_stat...

🔭If you work in stats you've probably heard of nested sampling: MCMCs fancy cousin. Enough people have asked me how it works that I've written an article (including examples!) explaining: 1. What NS is 2. Why we need it over MCMC 3. How to know if it's working hughmcdougall.github.io/blog/03_stat...

Extremely excited to announce the first paper / project of my PhD: LITMUS – a new Bayesian framework for reverberation mapping lag recovery! The paper is on arXiv at arxiv.org/abs/2505.09832, or you can find the code at hughmcdougall.github.io/litmus/ and the docs at hughmcdougall.github.io/litmus/

For my first post on bluesky, I present to the world an astronomer friendly guide to taking your first steps with #NumPyro: hughmcdougall.github.io/blog/02_nump...