Bob Benjamin

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YouTube video by Space Telescope Science Institute Cat's Paw Nebula - James Webb Space Telescope #shorts

🐾 An image of the Cat's Paw Nebula by #NASAWebb in near-infrared light was released this month.

This visualization explores a subset of toe bean-reminiscent structures within a section of the nebula, a massive, local star-forming region located approximately 4,000 light-years away. 🔭 🧪

Oops, JHU, not STScI… sorry!

Always fun to look at accepted HST programs. Hats off to David Thilker (STScI) with a title that doubles as a cry for help: “Our grasp of star formation, feedback, and galaxy evolution is incomplete without a JWST+HST look at the HI-dominated, outer disk of a spiral galaxy”

Hear, hear! Good luck!

The hardest disbelief to suspend about the show.

data: CL-WESTERLUND-2-NIRCAM, released 2025-07-14, processed: C.Blanchard

🔭 Program 3523-Evolution of protoplanetary disks and early stellar evolution in starburst: A NIRCam and MIRI observation of the young starburst cluster Westerlund 2: www.stsci.edu/jwst-program...

Data:CL-WESTERLUND-2-NIRCAM, released:2025-07-14

NASA, ESA, CSA, STSci/ #JWST NIRCam 410, 335, 150-162

🔭🧪 SPHEREx data are at IRSA! irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/Missions/sph...

Getting an account on the RSP Before getting started: Understand whether you have Rubin data rights.- Rubin data rights are required in order to hold an account in the Rubin Science Platform., All scientists and students affili...

🔭 Friendly advice for astronomers in the US and Chile--if you are excited to access @vrubinobs.bsky.social Data Preview 1 on Monday, request your account *now*--it has to get approved by a human. For best results use your university single-sign on, if available.

rsp.lsst.io/guides/getti...

Here's a little side-by-side of a patch of our Virgo imaging (from Mihos+17) compared to today's Rubin release. I knew that Rubin field looked familiar! Nice to see they recover a lot of that low surface brightness structure. 🔭

Statistical Machine Learning for Astronomy -- A Textbook This textbook provides a systematic treatment of statistical machine learning for astronomical research through the lens of Bayesian inference, developing a unified framework that reveals connections ...

An absolutely fantastic textbook on statistics and machine learning by Prof. Yuan-Sen Ting came out this week - and it's free! #astromethods ☄️

I had a read and it's incredibly comprehensive and well-written - I expect this to become *the* foundation book on stats & ML basics in astro.

This is an early computer rendering of how the Earth's gravity would distort light from distant stars if our planet had the density of a neutron star. The resolution of the image is very low -- maybe 256x256 -- and the color palette is limited. The Earth is in the center of the image, oriented so that North and South America are visible to the viewer. Parts of Europe and Africa are also visible because of the distortion of light rays by the the Neutron-Earth's gravity. Images of stars cluster near the Earth, and the shapes of nearby spherical objects are slightly distorted.

The Astronomy Picture of the Day website posted its first picture OTD in 1995. It was a computer-generated image showing how Earth would bend starlight if it had the density of a neutron star.

APOD is *thirty years old* today! 🧪 🔭

apod.nasa.gov/rjn/apod/ap9...
Image: Robert Nemiroff

The core portion of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has successfully completed vibration testing, ensuring it will withstand the extreme shaking experienced during launch: go.nasa.gov/4jNWjcK 🔭 🧪

Dara Norman @aas.org President kicks off the meeting with inspiration. “We are all in this together”. #aas246
🧪🔭✨

Next to Trump and Musk, Shatner and I look like adoring newlyweds.

The new galactic space port should be opening tomorrow.

Explore the port and then take a starship and visit a dozen locations within 1250 parsecs (4000 light-years).

🚀 The Roman Science Support Center (SSC) at IPAC has a new, redesigned website: roman.ipac.caltech.edu

Explore resources to prep for Roman science — including:
🧪 Simulated data and detailed instrument specs
🔭 Virtual Lecture Series
📝 Guidance for the first Call for Proposals

The central portion of a lenticular galaxy. The center holds a bright-white core that illuminates most of the image. The brightness decreases with distance from the center. Water-like waves of dark brown dust surround the center with long clouds of brown dust slightly above. Faint red stars are spread throughout.

Although NGC 4753, seen in this edge-on Hubble observation, appears to be exceptional, astronomers theorize that if one were to look at it from above it would look like a normal spiral galaxy: bit.ly/3G2bTmJ 🔭 🧪

Frank Kameny the astronomer The famed gay rights leader and accomplished scientist was one of thousands of US government employees who lost their livelihoods during the Lavender Scare.

Astronomer and gay rights leader Frank Kameny was born 100 years ago today. His fight for justice helped foster change in and beyond STEM. doi.org/10.1063/pt.s...
#HistSci #Physics #Astronomy

I realize now that I’ve wanted to see this my entire career.

For my first bluesky post (🥳🎉), I'll describe my cover image. Our Galactic Center stands alone and strange. Largely separated from the rest of the Galaxy, it responsible for controlling how much gas eventually flows towards the central supermassive black hole.

Please send me any other flaws you run across! We are putting together a list of the things we need to improve. Will have multiple people working on this over the summer.

YouTube video by Space Telescope Science Institute Flight to the Carina Nebula Complex

Travel across interstellar space to the vast star-forming region of the Carina Nebula Complex with this visualization. 🔭 🧪

Title for my talk at a meeting this summer: “Atomizing Milky Way Spiral Structure”. Several people are thinking along these lines!

Let the science begin! 🥁
On May 1, NASA’s SPHEREx space observatory began regular science operations, which consist of taking about 3,600 images per day.
Read more here: spherex.caltech.edu/news/nasa-s-...

This work by my collaborator Blakesley (with support from yours truly) is based on data made much more easily available by MAST! This paper would not have happened if we (esp.
adrian lucy) hadn’t made this data so easy to use! Go @mast-news.bsky.social !!

So this is cool. Also fun to see my fellow badger PhD, Dr. Burkhart, and current Chalmers colleague, Dr. Black in the same article. Astro connections and friends spanning time and space. :) 🔭🧪

YouTube video by American Museum of Natural History Encounters in the Milky Way–Opening June 9

A trailer has dropped for Encounters in the Milky Way, the new Hayden Planetarium Space Show @amnh opening in NYC on 9 June 2025 youtu.be/a4j9GvmpZtU?...

The path leading to UNC Asheville's physics building in the springtime. The sun is backlighting flowering trees and daffodils.

One of my amazing colleagues is retiring, and so our department at UNC Asheville is hiring a Lecturer in Physics to begin Fall 2025. Please help me by sharing with eligible physicists (MS/PhD) who are passionate about teaching in a small, public liberal arts setting! jobs.unca.edu/postings/8244

Trump’s Wildly Unconstitutional Plot to Banish U.S. Citizens to Gulags His plan to send American citizens to foreign prisons is the latest in a long series of affronts to the American constitutional order.

Among the Declaration of Independence’s grievances against the Crown was “transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offences.”

newrepublic.com/article/1939...

In the light of some recent events, I have had a few thoughts on bullying in science. Astronomy seems to have a particular issue with it, with several high-profile cases. I’ve been on the receiving end a few times, both as an early career researcher and a senior academic… 1/4 🧪🔭