Phil Naranjo

Did any or you see that glowing cloud in Washington State’s sky (USA)? A SpaceX Falcon 9 2nd stage venting propellant 550 km up after delivering Starlink satellites. It catches sunlight after sunset. We can see whenever a Florida Starlink launch happens 1-3 hrs before sunset. I vibe coded bad sim.

Thanks, Klaas! I will read it. Always curious about deeptime storage.

Data centres could store information in glass for thousands of years Microsoft researchers have developed a technology that writes data into glass with lasers, raising the prospect of robotic libraries full of glass tablets packed with data

“…Microsoft’s Project Silica have now demonstrated a similar glass-based technology that might lead to long-lasting glass data libraries in the near future.”

How Does China's Spacecraft Compare to NASA's Artemis? China's space program is quietly building momentum for a moon landing by 2030. Could they outpace NASA's Artemis mission?

The mission architecture for America’s Artemis 3 lunar program is in disarray and has created an opportunity for China project alternative vision of humanity’s future in space. Less sophisticated but steady/stable progress compared to the US. The proverbial rabbit and the hare (non) race.

LAUNCH at about 0357 UTC Feb 7 of a CZ-2F from Jiuquan with the fourth flight of the Chinese robotic recoverable spaceplane (usually thought of as comparable to the X-37B).

One year ago today, the #ngVLA prototype antenna dish was LIFTED onto its pedestal. 🏗️📡 Raise your hand if you watched that livestream last year!

mtex antenna technology | Liebherr
📸 Credit: NSF/AUI/NSF NRAO/Desert Drones LLC.

Learn more: ngvla.nrao.edu

#Astronomy #RadioAstronomy #NRAO

It’s been a very gentle winter here in the US Pacific Northwest. We’re expecting cold to set in next week. Sunset, from the city of Edmunds, Washington State. This is the Salish Sea, which connects to the Pacific Ocean.

Have we solved the mystery of a long-lost Soviet spacecraft, Luna 9? Scientists have spent decades searching for the final resting place of Luna 9, the first spacecraft to soft-land on the moon. Now they’re on the cusp of finding it

The craft had been though to be too small, below the resolution of lunar orbiters, but “…leveraging machine-learning algorithms and painstaking manual open-source intelligence methods—have identified several promising candidate sites.”

Build Your Own Pico Balloon and Explore the Stratosphere A $4 Raspberry Pi Pico can help you track a DIY balloon around the world.

“…pico balloonists take advantage of an amateur-radio network called #WSPR (Weak Signal Propagation Reporter), a protocol developed by a rather famous #hamradio enthusiast”

Found this vintage book from 1902, the liminal dawn of the automobile, just a year before Ford founded his company. Back when cars were DIY “self-propelled vehicles,” it reads like a hands-on MAKE magazine. Super dieselpunk energy. 🛠️📖 #booksky

YouTube video by Rootkid I built a light that can see radio waves

Love this project that turns WiFi radio signals into a horizontal light bar capturing the RF spectrum. It lets you see the invisible streams of data coursing through seemingly empty space. Inspired.

YouTube video by Space Zone Everything About Crazy Journey of Artemis II to the Moon You Should Know

The second half of the video, with its honest assessment of the Artemis program, discuss as an option for getting America back to the moon by using a non-reusable #SpaceX Starship.

NASA Is Studying a Private Mission to Boost Hubble's Orbit. Is It Worth the Risk? SpaceX and the entrepreneur Jared Isaacman are pursuing a plan to rescue the iconic Hubble Space Telescope from a fiery plunge into Earth’s atmosphere

Even if it weren’t operational, it would be a historic artifact worthy of boosting into an archival orbit. What do you think? #hubble #nasa

The Hubble Space Telescope is old, but it’s far from busted The venerable Hubble observatory is going strong despite its decades in space and the advent of next-generation successors

Hubble Space Telescope: old and busted or bold and trusted?

www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-...

[My words, on Sciam]

🧪 🔭

@NatReconOfc just peeled back decades of secrecy on JUMPSEAT, America’s first generation Highly Elliptical Orbit signals-collection satellite program. Launched 1971–1987 these Molniya orbit eavesdroppers sat high over the north, listening deep into Soviet radar & comm traffic during the Cold War.

JWST unveils most intricate map yet of cosmic dark matter Astronomers puzzled out minuscule distortions in images of faraway galaxies taken by JWST in order to chart the invisible

Now on @sciam.bsky.social: The misty clumps that seem to mar this starry view are actually the main subjects of this image from NASA's JWST, which is the most intricate map of cosmic dark matter anyone has ever seen. By SciAm's new reporter, Joe Howlett!

www.scientificamerican.com/article/jwst...

I've updated my megaconstellations list www.planet4589.org/space/con/co... with details of the planned Blue Origin Terawave system and the enormous CTC1 and CTC2 constellations China just filed with the ITU, for a total of almost 750,000 proposed satellites in the years to come.

The Mythology Of Conscious AI | NOEMA Why consciousness is more likely a property of life than of computation and why creating conscious, or even conscious-seeming AI, is a bad idea.

We keep asking whether #AI will become conscious. Anil Seth flips the question: what if consciousness isn’t computation at all, but what it feels like for a living system to stay alive? I’ve wondered about the danger of machines that cleverly simulate consciousness, but are not. Anyway, deep read

The aurora is active tonight in the US #PNW. I was cutting up our Christmas tree at our home in here in North #Seattle, when I turned and looked over my shoulder to glimpse majestic, undulating curtains of pale green, radiant spears of white/carmine.

RAO Telescopes Instrumentation

The Kaylie Green Memorial Telescope is Baker-Nunn #15 reborn: a Cold War Schmidt camera built to track satellites on film, 76 cm spherical mirror, now refit for modern astronomy. Same fast optics. New mission: time-domain photometry, sky survey at 🇨🇦 Rothney Astrophysical Observatory.

Taken tonight with @ucalgary.bsky.social’s Rothney Astrophysical Observatory’s 50 cm Kaylie Green Memorial Telescope of Cold War Baker-Nunn design. This very wide angle view captured the Andromeda #Galaxy, M31 and its two satellite galaxies, M32 & 110 as well as a bright #meteor. #astronomy

YouTube video by KUTV 2 News Salt Lake City UNIX v4 program found cleaning out an office at the University of Utah

Earliest version of Unix OS (v4) still in existence accidentally discovered by university researchers.

It's time to stop teaching the biggest lie about Hawking radiation It's not about particle-antiparticle pairs falling into or escaping from a black hole. A deeper explanation alters our view of reality.

It’s time to stop teaching the biggest lie about Hawking radiation

Have you ever heard that #Hawking radiation works by "pair popping" of particles and antiparticles out of the quantum vacuum?

Let's debunk the biggest lie about black hole evaporation.
bigthink.com/starts-with-...
#space #astro

Former Google CEO plans to singlehandedly fund a Hubble telescope replacement “This is a very significant contribution to the astronomical community."

“…Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, announced a major investment in not just one telescope project, but four. Each of these new telescopes brings a novel capability online; however, the most intriguing new instrument is a space-based telescope named Lazuli.”

Japanese advertising icon from the late 1970s / very early 1980s, created to promote high-end consumer audio equipment.

テクノロボ コンボイ
Tekuno Robo Konboi
“Technorobo Comboy”

Astronomers Have Discovered the Pleiades’ Secret Stellar Family The “Seven Sisters” of the Pleiades are part of a much larger complex that can help reveal our galaxy’s deep history

The “Seven Sisters” of the Pleiades are part of a much larger complex that can help reveal our galaxy’s deep history

Most sensitive radio observations to date find no evidence of technosignature from 3I/ATLAS Since the interstellar object (ISO) 3I/ATLAS was first discovered on July 1, 2025, it has garnered much attention, including speculation, hopes and fears that it may somehow contain evidence of techno...

…Not surprising but I think this research argues that real technosignatures may be fleeting, narrow, and time-dependent, more like sparks than beacons. Intelligence’s presence is transient, not announce itself forever. #3iatlas #seti #astronomy

Low Earth Orbit has become a tightly packed ecosystem.
Satellites pass one another every few seconds, surviving through constant, fuel-burning corrections. New research suggests that if steering failed, a major collision could occur in under 3 days. It could lead to a catastrophic chain reaction.

I was reading that in 1952, at #Cambridge, a PhD student built OXO, a tic-tac-toe game on the EDSAC computer. It played perfectly, using early symbolic #AI logic to reason about future moves. A game but also but one of the first machines to think ahead.