John ZuHone

Really enjoying this classic Sesame Street segment, two minutes of freestyle jazz riffing on saxophone factory footage

Source for this particular quote? I haven’t heard it, and it doesn’t jive with other things he said.

AAS Alarmed by Rumored Deep Cuts to NASA and National Science Foundation

Recent reports have indicated that the White House may soon be proposing drastic cuts to future budgets for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD). aas.org/posts/news/2...

White House may seek to slash NASA’s science budget by 50 percent “It would be nothing short of an extinction-level event for space science.”…

White House may seek to slash NASA’s science budget by 50 percent arstechnica.com/space/2025/0...

a cartoon drawing of a green parrot with a large beak . ALT: a cartoon drawing of a green parrot with a large beak .

Slack: *any message*
Astronomers:

Please look up the influenza epidemic of 1918-19 to understand that the CDC not selecting strains for next year’s vaccines sets the stage for a public health calamity that will, without doubt and at bare minimum, catastrophically and directly impact people you know. This is a five alarm fire.

Meet the man who single-handedly tracks every spaceflight mission ever For more than 40 years, Jonathan McDowell has tirelessly catalogued the space industry. Now he is planning to retire, and looking to pass on his extensive collection of knowledge

All the best to @planet4589.bsky.social with his retirement. Will gladly welcome him back to the UK!

www.newscientist.com/article/2468...

Because of four decades of bad faith narratives by rich folks who want your taxes to go up and their taxes to go down, most folks don’t know this: career federal workers are heroes who work extremely hard every day and go above and beyond all across America to improve your lives.

US science in chaos as impact of Trump's executive orders sinks in – Physics World US science hit by staff layoffs, slashed budgets, axed diversity programmes and cancelled conferences

Donald Trump’s second term as US President has begun with staff layoffs, slashed budgets, axed diversity programmes and cancelled conferences in what some see as a new "dark ages" 🧪⚛️ physicsworld.com/a/us-science...

Cosmic Rays vs. Thermal Emission: An X-ray Showdown Today's paper puts forth an alternative explanation for the cause of recently detected X-ray emission around galaxies!

From Skylar Grayson @skylargrayson.bsky.social : Today’s paper puts forth an alternative explanation for the cause of recently detected X-ray emission around galaxies! 🔭✨
astrobites.org/2025/02/12/x...

NSF funded this 🧪 www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/...

2022 Senior Review of Operating Missions - NASA Science NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) periodically conducts independent, comparative reviews of its operating missions. NASA uses the findings from these

NASA senior review reports from 2022 (the PDFs linked on this page) have been scrubbed from NASA websites. I am grateful to archive.org who retains these and other important reports for our field. 🔭🧪⚛️ science.nasa.gov/astrophysics...

The people who voted for Trump because they thought he’d pull the U.S. back from foreign entanglements and overseas adventurism are really among the prime suckers of our era.

If they "are serious about slashing NSF, the result would be catastrophic, the same program manager warned. Cutting the $10 billion grantmaking agency in half would “gut the intellectual center of U.S. leadership in science and technology,” the official said. www.eenews.net/articles/sci...

Reassuring scared colleagues that their third shift work over the years supporting their community is valuable and good and they should get to own that, and I hope they can again.

GitHub - emilyhunt/SK8plotlib: Turn any matplotlib line chart into a line skateboarding game. Turn any matplotlib line chart into a line skateboarding game. - emilyhunt/SK8plotlib

"pip install sk8plotlib" if you want to give it a try!

Note that rescaling the skateboard to the data in the plot isn't supported yet, & the skateboard always spawns at (0,0) still, so if you have large or small numbers (or a log plot) then it won't like it

Instructions on GitHub:

Still not allowed back to our house for another night, but grateful that so far it looks like we have a home to return to. My heart goes out to all my friends and colleagues who lost everything today. #LAFires

Edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 3556 AKA M108, showing bright star-forming knots and a winding lane of dust absorption.

Owl Nebula (M97), nearly round greenish-blue cloud with blue central star and two darker patches line an hourglass (the owl's eyes, I think).

Disturbed spiral galaxy NGC 3368 (M96), with complex dust tendrils, ringlike outer spiral arms, and edge-on red background galaxy behindone of those outer wrms.

Galaxy triple NGC 3379 (M105),lenticular galaxy NGC 3384, spiral galaxy NGC 3389 in Leo. NGC 3379 is a photometric standard galaxy and extraordinarily round from our point of view (despite Doppler observations showing that it has net rotation along our line of sight. Go figure).

Solstice imaging with Celestron Origin - these all came from 2 ~hour-long exposures. Stay up late this time of year, you can see into the Realm of the Nebulae (plus an occasional photobombing actual nebula). M108/M97/M96/M105 and friends.

Recently talked to a student who admitted to using ChatGPT as a study device - by feeding it all of the class lecture slides and having it generate summaries. So now OpenAI has ownership of all the slides my co-instructor and I created from scratch…

Or maybe it’s not a good idea regardless of who has the power.

The Prime galaxy: the points in the plot have coordinates x = p*cos(p) y = p*sin(p) where p are prime numbers.

The Prime galaxy: the points in the plot have coordinates
x = p*cos(p)
y = p*sin(p)
where p are prime numbers.

The Oort cloud is full of comets or as Jupiter calls them, snacks. 🔭

Is there life after proposals?

And people* wonder why I search for new planets. Look at this. LOOK AT THIS. It’s Io, one of Jupiter’s moons. Isn’t that just about the most evocative surface you could imagine? WHAT ELSE IS OUT THERE?

NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill

*my mother

Look, John Wheeler was a brilliant physicist, but I just read the famous “it from bit” essay and it is quite the hot jumbled mess.

How you know Elon announced a new feature on Twitter

I know this

Tweet showing two images of JWST objects processed by the user. The text reads: CosmicRami Spent pretty much the whole afternoon playing with JWST images. Managed to import different colour channels, learnt tons! That article was great! Thanks! Cant believe this data is just there for anyone to do what they want!

Tweet with text: Forgot to credit: NGC1365 - Credit: JWST/NASA/ESA/STScI/Lee, Janice(JW2107) - Filters: NIRCAM/F335 M16 Pillars of creation - Credit: JWST/NASA/ESA/STScI/Pontoppidan, Klaus M(jw02739) - Filters: NIRCAM/F090w

Well, this is neat! People are already using my step-by-step guide on processing JWST images and producing results after I published the article yesterday.

And look, they are following the way I outlined to pay proper credits to the science team 🥹🥹
(still need to stress the usage of alt-text pls!)

Astronomers running to arxiv to read up on dimethylsulfide.