S.M. Pritchard
@smpritchard.bsky.social
Physics BSc. | Hard SF Writer/Worldbuilder | Space Artist | Amateur (hopefully one day professional) Astronomer | They/Them | Opinions my own
“Not to know what’s beyond is like spending your life in the cellar, being completely oblivious of all the wonderful things around us.” Astronomer Helen Sawyer Hogg was born #OTD in 1905. She was an authority on variable stars and globular clusters, and a sci-com pioneer. 🧪 👩🔬 🔭 Image: U. Toronto
The argument that curiosity-driven research should be supported because it reflects an essential part of human nature does not work if you try it on people who lost their essential humanity a long time ago.
Carbon nanotubes get invoked a lot in sci fi and I need y'all to understand they are basically Super Asbestos They will give you fucking mesothelioma
Conservative ideology is rare at universities because it is an intellectual failure. It provides no useful insights and produces no technological advances. It failed. In the biggest free market for ideas ever created, the market chose the productive route of real scholarship and real research.
So tiny, but yet not an obvious rubble pile. Very strange! A shard from a larger parent body, cast off from a massive impact perhaps?
Andrew Jones@andrewjonesspace.bsky.social · last mo.Tianwen-2 had arrived. Here's asteroid Kamo'oalewa seen from 20 km away www.xinhuanet.com/20260706/eb8...
Tianwen-2 had arrived. Here's asteroid Kamo'oalewa seen from 20 km away www.xinhuanet.com/20260706/eb8...
Andrew Jones@andrewjonesspace.bsky.social · last mo.Tianwen-2 sample return mission is expected to arrive at the near Earth asteroid Kamo'oalewa tomorrow (July 4) at a distance of ~20 kilometres. Hopefully we'll also see the first images of the asteroid very soon. mp.weixin.qq.com/s/97RjX0XCVs...
An #OTD thread from last year about Henrietta Swan Leavitt, and an important tool for measuring cosmic distances. 🧪 🔭 👩🔬
Robert McNees@mcnees.bsky.social · last yr.Astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt was born #OTD in 1868. She established the period-luminosity relation for Cepheid variable stars, an essential tool for understanding the scale of our Universe. 🧪 👩🔬 🔭 Image: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
The sky is our common heritage. Billionaires have no right to unilaterally take it from us, as they have so much else. It is past time for mega-constellations to be banned and regulated like the pollution they are.
ESO@eso.org · last mo.🚨 Beyond the limit 🚨 New ESO study finds that current proposals to launch 1.7+ million satellites into orbit would have devastating consequences for astronomy. The most extreme proposals come from SpaceX & Reflect Orbital 🔭 🧪 ☄️ #DarkSkies #SatelliteConstellations 1/4
Fuck every single Democrat that has ever been willing to compromise on trans dignity, rights and humanity. I hope you assholes are pleased with yourselves. I don’t know if you could’ve prevented this moment, but you should’ve been fighting every step of the way.
ElieNYC@elienyc.bsky.social · last mo.See, people always want to make this just about "sports," but the real upshot here is that, 6-3, trans women can't make a claim under the Equal Protection Clause. And if they can't do that, it's hard to see how they have constitutional rights.
I'm normally anti-prison but saying this sentence should automatically land you in jail.
ProPublica@propublica.org · 2mo agoNEW: Regulators have linked Mark McAfee’s raw dairy farm to more than a dozen recalls and outbreaks that left hundreds of people ill. “I’ve put a couple kids in the hospital,” McAfee said. “But here’s the thing: I’m a pioneer.”
Didn't get into the post-bacc I applied to. Guess that's another year in industry. Although given that the entire foundation for scientific research is being actively destroyed by Russel Vought, I might have to accept I'll never get into professional astronomy.
Gas giant, ice giant, terrestrial, chthonian, carbonaceous, and super-puff.
madeline odent@oldenoughtosay.com · 3mo agowhat are the Six Genders? wrong answers only
Fundamentally, the reason we do science is the same reason we make art. Both are creative expressions of our humanity and both are tools for us to explore and understand reality. To treat either as a commodity is to diminish ourselves.
Nolan Void@wolter.bsky.social · 3mo agoThis is the money paragraph for me.
I am not smart enough to give advice to @chanda.blacksky.app and I can't wait to read this book. But I would argue that there's an even greater possibility here: we need humanistic perspectives incorporated into techno-scientific practice to improve their outcomes so everyone benefits.
Nolan Void@wolter.bsky.social · 3mo agoThis is the money paragraph for me.
Barnard 175, a dense cloud of interstellar dust. It's 1400 light-years away in the constellation of Cepehus and is part of the much larger molecular cloud complex known as the Cepheus Flare. The illuminated region is the reflection nebula VdB 152. About 7 hours total integration over two nights. 🔭
This is the kind of shit you'd do when trying to speedrun a game of Plague Inc.
Fiona "Fi" Webster 🌎🌍🌏@fiona-webster22.bsky.social · 3mo ago
The more I look at this, the more painful it gets.
Linn Boldt-Christmas@nplinnspace.bsky.social · 3mo ago🔭 A cautionary tale for undergrads (and above!) using AI for #astro plots: our BSc student wanted to make a "quick" HR diagram showcasing M-dwarfs & thought some chatbot could make one and... well... ...extra credits are now offered to students who can correctly find all errors on cursedHR.png 🫠 🧪
Conversations about the future of higher education in the US need to start from the unfortunate, basic fact that both Democrats and Republicans agree with Reagan that government should not subsidize curiosity driven learning and inquiry.
Last reskeet: Yeeeeah, srsly. The human superpower is cooperation, not murder. Huge numbers of species commit murder at scale, to the best of their ability. Only one teaches their children how to read, builds steamships and puts rovers on Mars.
Imagine how many grad students could be funded with the kinds of donations made to university athletics programs
Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 3mo agoI am begging people looking to make major donations to universities to either 1) care as much about academics as they do sports, or 2) make unrestricted gifts instead. Signed, A faculty member at a university with brand new athletic facilities and crumbling teaching and research infrastructure
I was just contacted by a reporter asking for comment about the whole Pluto planet thing. Hanging on by a thread over here.
Issacman has a net worth of about $1.5 billion. I think all of that should be liquidated and seized, to be used to help partially fund these missions.
Jeff Foust@jfoust.bsky.social · 3mo agoRep. Dean (D-PA) asks who made the decision to omit the >50 science missions proposed for cancellation from the budget request. Isaacman doesn't clearly answer, but says other missions can fill the gap.
When Einstein developed general relativity the closest thing to a practical application that could even be imagined at the time was a slightly more precise description of where to look for the planet Mercury in the sky, and yet now we’d all be literally lost without it. Anyway: fund basic research.
Mike Boylan-Kolchin@mbkplus.bsky.social · 3mo agoGPS satellites move at 1/100000 the speed of light, causing their clocks to tick slower by 7 microseconds per day, and orbit at a height that makes their clocks tick faster by 45 microseconds per day. Two relativistic effects, both at the 1 part in 10 billion level, both essential for GPS accuracy 🧪
I think I've managed to boil down the core tenets of my setting, now I just need to actually write some stories.
More images from a few days ago: the globular cluster M5 and the Sombrero Galaxy (M104). 🔭🧪
