@mattkenworthy
Professor of astronomy working at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands on the direct imaging of extrasolar planets and transits of giant ring systems || Opinions my own || Will tell Dad jokes for cash. https://kenworthy.space/
Every place has its own time using local noon. Bonus: this was done for railway stations in Victorian era England, and resulted in town clocks having two different hands - one for London time, and another for local time!
I'm getting a migraine just looking at this
*Victorian England local mean times entered the chat*
New NICER neutron star results this morning, led by Yves Kini! For the first rotation-powered millisecond pulsar we ever reported on, PSR J0030+0451.
More data (6 years!), background constraints fully incorporated, and improved sampling. #highenergyastro 🔭🧪
arxiv.org/abs/2602.23743
The answer is "No, go do something else instead"
I really love the new YouTube “you’re not a bot” sign in page, because when I click to watch a video this dialog pops up and I ask myself “Do I really need to watch this video?” and the answer is almost always “No I don’t” and I go do something more productive/useful instead. #lifehack
Huh. Weird. My Visles keyboard and/or Mac OSX decided to spontaneously swap the Option and Command keys on me. This led to a few puzzling minutes wondering if my keyboard had broken…
Beautiful work! I really love the paper calculators that were produced before mechanical computers. The number of nomograms produced was also amazing.
Since yesterday, the Einstein AI cheatbot website underwent some rebranding. The tagline changed from "Einstein does the busywork so you don't have to," to "Einstein is the personal tutor every student deserves." In the FAQ, "How does Einstein do all this?" became "How does Einstein help me learn?"
The FCC just opened public comments on SpaceX's plan to launch a million satellites to do AI compute in space. Under the current proposal, an environmental review won't be required. Please consider submitting a public comment to oppose this damaging plan.
darksky.org/news/two-sat...
This paper gets into the ballpark but not the ludicrous numbers discussed above.
Reflect Orbital particularly concerns me given its many large satellites with (at a particular angle) a surface brightness comparable to the Sun.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
That. Is. MAGNIFICENT!
We tried to get the word "rainbows" printed in rainbow colours in MNRAS. We got a very curt "please do not do that" in response from the copy editor.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor sitting in a reclined seat of a car being driven out of a police station, and the demon Pazuzu as seen in the film "The Exorcist"
It’s taken me a couple of days to work out where I’ve seen that look before, then as I was watching “The Exorcist” the answer came to me in a flash….
I've tried for a few conferences to get below 50 words on a poster. I'm getting close....
I was in a swimming club and regularly came in dead last. I didn't mind because I loved swimming! One time I beat one other "golden" student and they had a full blown melt down in the pool next to me.
Because I beat them. Just the once.
That indicent put me off student sports for good.
Almost all primary journals are digital only - there are no hardcopy prints of the publications. It is hard to imagine how it is justified to charge thousands of USD for a single article. Especially when considering that current peer-review journals would not exist without the main ingredient: free reviewers.
Also, this is maddening.
The authors could have *asked* why even zero-profit-margin journals is the AAS Journals cost so much to produce. No need to imagine! There's a lot more to producing a real, archived, edited, typeset, scientific article with data than peer reviewer labor.
Every time I see people complain about doing peer review “for free” for community journals I lose my mind further. If you’re a salaried academic this is your job! The money would come from the community anyway in these journals! In every industry people fought to convert piecework to wage or salary!
And before anyone gets mad in the replies - I said community journals! Elsevier journals can go jump in the lake, etc. But we’re lucky in astronomy that ApJ/PASA/MNRAS/A&A are the main venues anyway and we don’t have a plague of the parasite journals. We need to support them and keep it that way!
And before, etc - love OJA and let’s keep that going
Always nice to see our group's discoveries make the rounds :) kenworthy.space/projects/yses/
Hello HARPS3! Are you ready for some optics? OK then ... let the optical installation begin!⭐
LLMs do not understand, will not understand, and cannot ever understand information. It's a glorified search engine combined with auto-compete, and you should treat it as such. No matter how much LLM companies try to tell you their machines can think or reason, they cannot and will not.
12/12
Two images of a point source representing the transient event. The first image is circular, the second one is not circular, suggesting it may be quite close to the Earth.
“Don’t blink. Don’t even blink”: Arima+ on “An optical transient candidate of ≲ 2-second duration captured by wide-field video observations” where they look up into the Earth’s shadow to capture these very fleeting events. I’m not sure of their interpretation, but it’s fascinating. #astrodon ☄
Threads was an initially inconspicuous made for TV film about nuclear war's impact on real people. The film plays out in excruciating, accurate detail how awful it would be for every single human affected. It is the best illustration of the horrors and human cost of nuclear war that I am aware of.
I hate the modern need to remake everything. Threads was the most harrowing thing I have ever watched and it will stay with me forever.
Nuclear war is NOT a subject matter that needs 'hope' and the original executed that perfectly.
I'm reading the paper and mulling over it... definitely worth your time to take a look!
Possible orbits for the exoplanet 51 Eri b drawn around the star, along with the planet at two locations in its orbit showing a dayside illuminated disk and a nightside disk.
Oh now this is VERY cool! Denis+ on “Cold and eccentric: a high-spectral resolution view of 51 Eri b with
VLT/HiRISE” where radial velocity measurements of the exoplanet enable a determination of the 3D orbit, and therefore you can calculate the PHASE as seen by Earth! #astrodon #exoplanet ☄
They said they'll post the talks on youtube, but maybe putting them on zenodo would be a longer term solution?
I think it's a great shame: I miss the Golden Age of scicom media. We're now retreating back into our groups and the fun side of open and online discovery is mostly gone. But so it goes: this too shall pass, the kids are alright. Enough grumbling, I'm off to yell at some clouds! /fin
The hippo from "Harvey Birdman" saying "Did you get that thing I sent ya?"
But we lost that critical mass - for the latest Spirit of Lyot, there are ZERO posts on the talks from the conference, or at least none that I can see. When I was looking around, I did see a lot of people posting, but only on Slack and Discord in their closed group silos. /7
