Trestan Simon

#heliophysics

A sunspot group over about an hour on 2022-09-03. It starts showing the photosphere on the "blue side" (shorter wavelength) of H-alpha, then shifts into H-alpha and finally goes back to the photosphere on the "red side" (longer wavelength).
#sun #sunspots #hydrogenalpha #astronomy

SOFTWARE TERMINOLOGY Then: application, program, operating system, script, shell, batch file, compiler, daemon, service, game, patch, software. Now: app, app, app, app, app, app, app, app, app, app, app, app.

They existed. This image is from 2012 at the latest

A close-crop of two sunspots viewed in hydrogen-alpha light -- an extensive field of filaments surrounds the spots.

The northeast quadrant of the Sun recorded October 3, 2025 in hydrogen-alpha light. Various features of the chromosphere are visible including several filaments, and prominences.

A few adjustments in data capture parameters was all it took to make a big difference in image processing and results! We're very pleased with Barlow-boosted views though we're still having some issues with achieving even lighting across whole-disk views...
#sunspots

Wikipedia is under attack — and how it can survive The site’s volunteers face threats from Trump, billionaires, and AI.

This long read in The Verge does a remarkable job of describing how Wikipedia's editing community works, the project's strengths and weaknesses, and the threats it faces.

www.theverge.com/cs/features/...

Testing this with SDO/AIA imagery of a series of eruptions from 2023 ☀️

What might we expect to see during @esa.int Solar Orbiter's upcoming remote-sensing windows; now with an inclined orbit. Here's the PFSS connectivity of Orbiter during the remote-sensing window of spring 2026 (17th Feb to 6th March), using the current coronal magnetic field and in-situ wind speeds.

Sunflower head soon to open

Sunflower head and a bee

Seven sunflower heads, three of which have bloomed, and one blurred bee

Not the usual Sun I study

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers.

The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

The Sun's Alfvén Surface | PUNCH mission The Alfvén surface – the outer boundary of the Sun's corona – is very complex. This visualization of the Sun's Alfvén surface, with regions below the surface shown using a total eclipse image from ast...

It's an exciting time as we ramp up the data reduction pipeline. Here's the first of several items about the legwork we've done as the science team prepares to execute our science! 🧪☀️

Our recent solar flare research was published! We present the first spectral observations of ‘Supra-Arcade Downflows’ (SADs) since 2003. SADs are dark finger-like downflows seen above solar flare loops, but their origins remain elusive! What do we find? 1/6

Citizen Science in Space and Atmospheric Sciences: Opportunities and Challenges - Surveys in Geophysics Citizen science (also referred to as participatory science or community science), in which members of the general public contribute to scientific research, is not a new concept, as early examples of s...

Check out this recent article I was a co-author on: "Citizen Science in Space and Atmospheric Sciences: Opportunities and Challenges"
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Here's a thread of the main points outlined in our paper!

#heliophysics

Broken app - spamming notifications The app isn’t updating but it’s spamming notifications. It’s going rapidly between KP4, KP5, and KP6.

From Sander Vancanneyt: "For an unknown reason SWPC stated delivering old data. We assume that SWPC always gives recent data, so we didn’t check the timestamps as it normally wouldn’t be necessary… until today 😭" community.spaceweatherlive.com/topic/3962-b...

Happy pride month to my fellow weather and space nerds. Go be happy and be you 💕🥹

Seven million articles on English Wikipedia! Lots of work still to do.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

A grayscale image of a pool surface covered in fog and illuminated by a flashlight. A single steam devil is visible in the center of the image and appears as an elongated tube.

... Three steam devils are visible in the center of the image.

... Two steam devils are visible in the center.

... One steam devil interacts with another, taller steam devil.

Small steam devils forming from the fog above a pool (water temp was 76°F and outside air temp was 56°F)

When Climate Research Fuels Climate Myths: Author Insights from a Misused Publication - Eos By equipping ourselves with preventive strategies, mitigation tools, and trusted networks, we can guide misinformed conversations back to accuracy and preserve the value of rigorous research.

Scientific publications do not exist in a vacuum. This means misinformation can sometimes make your climate science go viral for all the wrong reasons.

Here are some tips for navigating the nightmare.
eos.org/opinions/whe...

Maybe this is old news, but you can completely block Writefull AI in Overleaf by using uBlock Origin with the rule:

www.overleaf.com writefull.ai * block

and the filter:

www.overleaf.com##.ol-overlay.writefull-error-notification.notification-type-error.notification

This is the extent to which the aurora was seen one year ago today during the May 2024 extreme geomagnetic storm. It was one of the largest aurora events in all of recorded history, actually.

The different colors of dots represent the dataset used to log the reports.

The day the #sun stood still... Very good seeing this morning. Image of huge spot group 4079 with #takahashi Mewlon 210 at f/24, Player One Neptune M camera.
#astronomy #astrophotography #solarsystem #spaceweather

This painting portrays a brightly sunlit crescent Earth showing the tan deserts and greener regions in Europe and Africa. The rest of the Earth is experiencing night, with city lights and gas flaring forming clusters and far clusters of city lights strung along networks of roads like sparkling dew drops on spider webs. Orange torches from oil fields are flares in oil fields based on 1980s references. One particularly bright one is, or was, in the North Sea near the UK. The etherial mostly green aurora encircles the magnetic pole, brightest in the part furthest from the daylight. This painting was done with acrylics using airbrushes as well as paintbrushes. The continental outlines were first drawn in, tracing a projection of a slide of a 3 foot globe that had the latitude and longitude intersections drawn in every 10 degrees as well as the coastlines, all drawn with Rapidograph technical pens. I made many photos of the globe at that stage of preparation for use in future projects like this. That globe was then painted in natural colors and used in the TV show Cosmos in various scenes. The traced continental outlines were then redrawn on the big tracing paper mask and on the illustration board, constantly referring to atlases. Areas were masked off with the tracing paper 'frisket', used with both the cutout lands and surrounding parts as the oceans then the lands were airbrushed in. Almost all the cloud detail was painted by hand with fine brushes. This painting was titled 'Portrait of Home', and I still have it. It was a kind of visual summation of space observations of Earth then. Such a painting done today would show gas flaring in different locations, but the annual mass burning of crop residues continues in the Equatorial regions. #SciArt

In homage to Earth Day, here is an acrylic on illustration board painting I did in the 80s. I used then newly released dim light satellite images for references of nighttime features such as the aurora and the brighter gas flares and agricultural burning competing in brightness with the city lights.

😎The Solar Patrol Service (SPS/ASUCAS) from Astronomical Institute of the 🇨🇿 Academy of Sciences captured a prominence eruption on Mar 28, 2025 in high cadence and large field of view Hα 🔭images (NE quadrant).

Daily 1-h Hα images Latest&Archive👇
🌐https://swe.ssa.esa.int/web/guest/sps-S019a-federated

PUNCH Collects Spectacular First Light | PUNCH mission first-light montage from PUNCH This first-light mosaic from PUNCH shows how the NFI and WFI fields of view fit together. Celestial objects are visible down to 9th magnitude (asteroid Iris) in the raw...

We released our first light images! Here's a nugget entry about it, with links to the official mission blog and two press releases. ☀️🧪🔭🛰️🚀

Wikipedia Editors Call It: It’s the “2025 Stock Market Crash” While the title of the article can still change, for the moment Wikipedia editors have decided that Trump crashed the stock market.

Wikipedia editors have decided: www.404media.co/wikipedia-ed...

Wireshark packet analysis showing NTP requests from me (10.218.195.150) to utcnist.colorado.edu (128.138.140.44) and responses from the default gateway (10.218.194.1) indicating that "Destination unreachable (Communication administratively filtered)".

I just realized that the CU Boulder guest Wi-Fi default gateway is blocking all of my NTP packets... so I am right next to NIST physically but am not allowed to synchronize with their public time servers? 128.138.140.44 is utcnist.colorado.edu

Massive, Unarchivable Datasets of Cancer, Covid, and Alzheimer's Research Could Be Lost Forever Days before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that 10,000 HHS staffers would lose their jobs, a message appeared on NIH research repository sites saying they were "under review."

Petabytes of critical government research that is marked for possible deletion cannot be archived because of technical and legal restrictions, meaning it is very likely to be lost forever:

www.404media.co/nih-archives...

Black and white photo of Joan Feynman. She is wearing a plain white fencing uniform, holding a fencing face mask under her right arm, and a foil or sabre or epee in her right hand. She is looking at the camera, and seems to be in the middle of saying something to the photographer.

Astrophysicist Joan Feynman was born #OTD in 1927.

She explained the origin of auroras, discovered that coronal mass ejections could be identified by the amount of helium in the solar wind, and elucidated the structure of Earth's magnetosphere. 🧪 🔭 👩‍🔬 ⚛️

Image: Charles Hirshberg

NASA's EZIE-Mag program lets students conduct science in concert with the EZIE space mission to study the aurora. Apply for your free magnetometer today: eziemag.jhuapl.edu #ITeachPhysics