JJ Hermes

And a new EO late last month (www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...) reclassifies NASA employees in a way that instantly stripped them of their union representation. Goddard plays a huge role for NASA and it is being kneecapped by the Trump administration.

Was there any notice of this change disallowing second years from applying? This is a total blindside from my end....

My personal expectation is that no matter what Congress does there are high-level personnel in place now at the NSF and NASA that can and will chose to operate at fractional funding levels to match the president's budget request. Why capitulate when the harms are probably already baked in?

Not an endorsement, but here's a concise counterpoint to keeping the government open: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/07/o...

You don’t rely on your calculator to THINK. Over-reliance on AI is putting a developing brain on autopilot.

Billions wasted, mysteries unsolved: The missions NASA may be forced… Proposed NASA cuts would cancel dozens of space missions — including spacecraft already paid for, launched, and making discoveries.

Here are all the missions that face cancellation as part of a devastating 47% cut to NASA's science program.
www.planetary.org/articles/bil...

Drone show over Boston Harbor for the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride. I’m sure just as he’d have expected.

Around two dozen people sit and stand at a long desk with computer monitors out of view. Several people are smiling or have their mouths open in amazement. One person in the back has their arms raised in celebration.

Eye to the sky…on-sky engineering tests have begun at NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory using the world’s largest digital camera! 🔭🧪

After installing and testing the LSST Camera, we turned the telescope to the sky—a moment 20 years in the making!

With that, Rubin #CommissioningNotes are back ✍️

🧵

We've had plenty of time to sort this out, seems like we're still making the same mistakes!

New Planet May Be Able to Nurture Organisms (Published 2010) Astronomers saw the distant planet capable of harboring water as a “Goldilocks planet”: not too hot, not too cold.

"Pressed ... about the possibility of life on Gliese 581g, Dr. Vogt protested that he was an astronomer, not a biologist. Then he relented, saying that, speaking strictly personally, he believed that 'the chances of life on this planet are almost 100 percent.'" www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/s...

Success! IWitnessed the Mayan serpent god Kukulkan’s #equinox appearance at Chichen Itza! On the equinoxes, the stepped pyramid’s corner casts a shadow from the setting sun onto the staircase, making a diamondback snake whose head is illuminated at the bottom. #astronomy

You flying Ryanair?!

Gene Kranz: "Failure is not an option" Elon Musk: "We will make mistakes"

(It was an iteration of the New England Flag I saw recently.) www.nps.gov/articles/000...

Typing the same prompt into Google Image search gets a much faster (and correct) menu of answers.

LLMs continue to disappoint me. Have a look at this swing and a miss from what should be in a LLM wheelhouse.

Jupiter rotation timelapse with lo (and shadow) transit! Taken Feb 8th from my backyard. Went out at 5 min intervals to capture a video. From each of these, the best 10% were stacked to produce a single frame (lucky imaging).

🔭C9.25, 📷 QHYII1585C

#jupiter #astrophotography #astronomy

Your groan-inducing puns will sustain me in these trying times.

120. The Impoundment Crisis of 2025 The Trump administration's Monday spending freeze is likely to provoke a crisis over the constitutionality of "impoundment"—one that the justices could well have to resolve *very* soon.

Trying to keep calm knowing that this federal funding move blatantly violates the Impoundment Control Act and will be challenged quickly (www.stevevladeck.com/p/120-the-im...). But it's clear that the Velociraptors are out of the cage and are currently testing the limits of the enclosure.

Ha, great analogy!

TIL "the adjective form of the word consensus is consensual." Sitting on this longer, "consensual" probably is the correct usage, since it is an adjective modifying "picture." But it's very awkward.

I just got proofs back from ApJ and I'm deeply disturbed by how a copy editor thought this was a valid correction. Am I crazy? Is there ever a valid reason to use "consensual" in this way? What is a "consensual picture"?!

Kinda reminds me of V1309 Scorpi, the contact binary that merged -- got a bit brighter before a dip and then merger. Gaia25abj looks like an x-ray source with an APOGEE spectrum showing tons of emission...

Turns out all our McDonald data came in a long period of quiescence that finally ended in 2024! Our paper today reveals the persistence we needed to find transits around SBSS 1232+563, demonstrating that white dwarf debris can be very sporadic! arxiv.org/abs/2501.02050

Unfortunately we just couldn't confirm it to have transits from rocky debris. We watched for nearly 40 hr from McDonald Observatory and saw nothing too exciting. Eventually we noted it as a strong candidate (ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021ApJ....), but weren't too convinced.

Back in 2017 we were brainstorming ways to find new white dwarfs orbited by asteroids getting ripped apart. The first was found in K2 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WD_1145...). We thought about using the uncertainties in Gaia -- and found a great candidate (zenodo.org/records/4088...).

Here's a fun backstory to a paper too many years in the making: "Sporadic Dips from Extended Debris Transiting the Metal-Rich White Dwarf SBSS 1232+563" (arxiv.org/abs/2501.02050) which just hit the arxiv.

Written in the Stars: How a BU Undergrad Rediscovered Her Passion for Space Science Astrophysics student Ariyana Bonab has studied the composition of 54,000 white dwarf star images—but she almost gave up on the subject

A story we ❤️about how exploring the Universe can re-ignite passion. And we don't mind that it's about looking at our white dwarf spectra in @jjhermes.bsky.social group 🤩🔭
www.bu.edu/articles/202...

periodic table of the elements color-coded by origin in the solar system. Learning more at this conference about how much of orange should be turned green

Updated periodic table with origin of elements in the Solar System (for boron and lithium at least)