@astromonnier
John Monnier, Professor of Astronomy, U. of Michigan Favorite Things: Imaging Stars & Exoplanets with Interferometry Developer: MIRC-X, MYSTIC, STARI 2014 Michelson Investigator Prize; 2019 AAS Joseph Weber Award http://monnier.us Opinions my own.
But he didnt know about interferometry. The #chara Array is just down the road from these amazing solar towers continuing this legacy. We can now study quite a diverse range of stars in quite some detail with milliarcsecond resolution.
Amazing projects all-around.
Could the LFAST telescopes design be a basis for a new fiber-coupled interferometer?
Happy New Years!
I will be attending AAS Meeting in Phoenix to present a poster on our STARI Mission. Look me up to learn more or to catch up.
starimission.space
Working on my first AAS "iPoster"... I hadn't realized the presenting screens are much smaller than a typical physical poster and so not sure this is really an upgrade for most people. What am I missing?
Real image of Super Moon by Sam Low with mock up of the STARI formation flying mission included with an artistic touch by Simone D'Amico
My STARI (starimission.space) Collaborators Simone D'Amico and Sam Low (Stanford) took time to make this image as we prepare for our System Requirements Review on Friday!
tinyurl.com/4ett99wv
#stari #nasa
@jwcutler.bsky.social
Happy to announce a paper 20+ years in the making:
arxiv.org/abs/2512.06066
In a huge group effort with new data from VLA, ATCA, Swift, Chandra, Keck aperture masking, and Keck adaptive optics, we report a "shocking" result about colliding wind WR112.
Enjoy! Let me know if you have any questions!
BREAKING: No. 2 Indiana beats No. 1 Ohio State 13-10 for its first Big Ten championship since 1967 and likely lock up the top seed in the playoff.
When I was a grad student, we dreamed of imaging nova (and supernova) explosions with our then-new infrared interferometers.
And while we are still waiting for a Milky Way SUPERnova, we CAN now see novae go boom using CHARA with instruments built at U. Michigan!
news.umich.edu/seeing-stell...
This article seemed to say the Observatory has 135 employees and can only afford 2 astronomers. :/
Card showing the benefits Of the Urban experience fee in a chicago hotel
Ha. The “Urban Experience Fee” unexpectedly cost us an extra $25 extra per night during our recent stay in Chicago. But look at what amenities were included:
Amazing work solving a tricky calibration problem with JWST aperture masking data! Any hope to improve ground-based systematics with this general approach?
@benjaminpope.bsky.social
arxiv.org/abs/2510.09806
Its much harder to help my kids with homework post-covid with no textbooks. Can’t help but wonder if the move to online resources is hurting learning across the board, but especially middle and high school.
Seems like you should try the method it on one of the classic CHARA datasets, either lambda and or zeta and. Is that in the works?
Two-panel meme. Top: hand-drawn sketch of Earth, Sun, and a red sun-synchronous orbit, with notes asking about allowed orbit angles. Caption: “How it started.” Bottom: polished 3D visualization of Earth with day/night shadow, orange SSO orbits, blue other orbits, and a red terminator line. Caption: “How it’s going.”
Thanks @planet4589.bsky.social
One ride to terminator every few years.... Check it out, @jwcutler.bsky.social !
This is brilliant. So a few are close to terminator but not many. Does your database contain the full dataset, including cubesats put in non polar orbits?
🚀 Rideshare reality check: @planet4589.bsky.social — is there a good source for CubeSat drop-off orbits from the past 5 years? I’m modeling #STARI (a LEO formation-flying mission) and need to know the most common insertion orbits. Dream case is SSO terminator—but I’m told those are unicorns 🦄.
Bravo to the organizers of the 2025 #smallsat Conference! Lively talks, great interactions, and flawless organization — plus free coffee, ice cream, lunches, and industry socials that set a high bar. Hope #AAS and #SPIE are taking notes! ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Excited to attend my first SmallSat conference in Salt Lake City this week. Many cool CubeSat missions and innovative companies exhibiting. I’ll talk about our formation flying mission STARI later in week.
#smallsat
#stari
Really hate to see Stanford going back on its pledge to halt legacy admissions.
stanforddaily.com/2025/08/06/s...
Bravo..
“ — making “Harvard astronomer” the scientific equivalent of “Florida man” didn’t just happen; it took long-term dedication.”
It is cool to see a movie about local Ann Arbor History funded by kickstarter!
Congratulations to the filmakers!
www.kickstarter.com/projects/196...
Ahh yes. Indeed, Justin is working on that! I should check in on that. Also folks are working on HWO targets with CHARA.
If characterizing nearby hot stars is important, We should talk about a chara survey to look for faint companions. We can do delta mag 8 within 0.15” for bright stars with modest effort. Open time through noirlab
Not sure how american those dollars are…
Toliman excepted?
Just wow.
For those also waiting, I just got a late NSF-ATI rejection today. The letter says only 10% success rate, notably lower than historical practice.
With MRI shutdown for next year, I suspect ATI (the only other NSF instrumentation programs) will be overwhelmed!
Would be interesting compare images using this novel polarization method with those by interferometry
See these images of same star by #VLTI
www.eso.org/public/news/...
Ok. So NSF has officially cut funding for one of its largest instrumentation programs for next year. Hope this is temporary.
www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...
John in front of Copernicus statue in Krakow
Spent time to visit Copernicus in old Krakow.
He worked at The Jagiellonian University in Krakow, the 4th oldest University in Europe, where they started out only teaching 3 disciplines: Law, Medicine, and Astronomy.