Dr. Kelley Hess

A medium sized bird stands in the grass. It is mostly black with a stunning blue breast and a red beak and head.

Three black birds walk through the grass and fallen leaves at the side of a bath. One mama hen and two fluffy chicks. A lake with a tree lined swampy shore is in the background.

Nice and cheers! I also escaped snow and slush and found some fun birds in Perth on a run. Maybe a purple swamphen? Also with chicks. Enjoy Andalucia!

Ooo! That looks perfect. Thanks, Tara!

Calling friends and fellow cyclists who know Perth, Australia: can anyone recommend somewhere to rent a bike for riding around the city and commuting? Thanks in advance! 🚲

evergreen

The base and pot of the Lucky Bamboo set sit in front of the Lego box picturing the final set.

A close up of the base from table level. The base has four curved feet and the pot on top is tan with a gold band running around it.

Looking inside the top of the pot. In the center is a round flat lego tile with a beautiful geometric design.

I started a new #Lego build just in time to leave the country: the Lucky Bamboo. Something else fun to look forward to when I’m back at the observatory again. The base was fun and I appreciate the little interior details (the decorated tile), even if they are hidden in the final assembly. 🪴

A question for scientists (construed as broadly as you like) of BlueSky: What makes something data?

(Question inspired by a talk I listened to this morning, and of course I have thoughts, but I wanted to throw this out there first.)

Picture of the Garmin Enduro 3 sports watch on my wrist. It has a large, color touch screen face (“amoled”) showing the time, various stats, and the 26 day battery life at 75% charged.

New gear day! Just in time for a six day trek across a bit of Tasmania (Dec) and a 60 km running race across a bit of Sweden (Jan). 😁

I had not! I love it when these stories are uncovered.

H/t @physgal.bsky.social who shares so much of this stuff with all of us. Give her a follow!

Absolutely awesome (and paid!) opportunity for writers ages 15-21 here. I'll be sharing this far and wide with young folks I know: "This call is for young adult writers, whose work I’d like to include in this anthology alongside some more familiar names."

Snow falling in front of the entrance to the Chalmers University campus.

Snow covered quad surrounded by snow covered trees.

A giant screw (“propeller”) statue in front of Maritime Center, covered in snow.

Första snön i Göteborg! ❄️

Learning Millimeter-Wave Adaptive Optics for AtLAST: Insights from Nobeyama - AtLAST Experts from OHB Digital Connect are collaborating with the Nobeyama team to investigate Millimeter-Wave Adaptive Optics (MAO), a promising technology that could facilitate unprecedented levels of opt...

Millimeter-Wave Adaptive Optics could facilitate unprecedented levels of optical control for #AtLAST. This technology is currently being tested on the Nobeyama 45m Radio Telescope so experts from OHB Digital Connect took a trip to find out more! 📡

www.atlast.uio.no/news-and-eve...

authors you have the chance to do the funniest thing right now

View out my office window at sunset. Can see the sea just over the top of a building in the foreground. The roof off the building still has frost on it at the end of the day!

Three radio telescopes in silhouette on the horizon with pink clouds and an orange sky with the sea seen to the left.

A couple deer in the middle distance watch me as I go by. The ray dome that protects the 20 m looks like a giant golf ball in the background. The picture is askew because I took it from the bike as I ride by. Couldn’t stop because the deer would scatter. The sky begins is light blue and pink.

Yeah Sweden is dark, but this is the best time of year for telescope sunset photos at Onsala Space Observatory. And the deer have their impressive antlers on. 🔭 📡 🦌 🌅

The cover of Ghostdrift by Suzanne Palmer. It features a spaceship traveling towards a debris field in front of a planet.

Finished Ghostdrift by @zanzjan.bsky.social this weekend, and it was as amazing as all the other Finder chronicle books. It’s a series I would happily pick up and start from scratch again as soon as I’ve finished it, and recommend to all! ❤️

Screenshot of iPhone camera mode showing menu options for picture styles.

Screen shot of iPhone camera mode with the exposure turned up to 10s.

Nice photo! Yes, you can force it to do 10s. Not sure if our camera menus are the same, but if so…touch the arrow button at the top center of the screen. This will cause a new menu to appear on the bottom. Then select the night mode (2nd icon on the left). This should get you a scroll-able exp dial.

Whooooaaaa, this is extremely neat!

And spectropolarimetry (which is the best, and what we used in my first paper too!) is at its core 💙

In a nutshell: astronomers used the polarization of light to study the shape of a supernova explosion before it interacted with surrounding material.

🔭🧪

Politicizing Transgender Athletes Is Dangerous. Lia Smith Deserved Better. "Let her passing be an inflection point for how you think about trans rights and trans people more generally."

this @katelynburns.com piece about the death of lia smith deserves your full attention

www.teenvogue.com/story/politi...

1/ The US Government has quietly removed a memorial to Black soldiers who died in World War II from the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten, South Limburg. The move follows a complaint from the right-wing Heritage Foundation to the American Battle Monuments Commission. ⬇️

As recently as the late 1980s, tuition at @uwmadison.bsky.social was <$1000/semester. In current dollars, that's about $2500/semester. There is one central reason for that: the <massive decline in state funding>. This was a choice. Other choices remain readily available.

Two panels about black GI’s who liberated the Netherlands disappeared in the Margraten War Cemetery.

This cemetery is both understated, solemn, and impressive and really drove home the steep price of a free country when I visited as a teen with my fellow “Bridge too far” interested friends.

A cowardly betrayal of the ideals on which the university was founded.

Whhhhyyyy?

The world would be immensely better if more religions and their believers had even a tenth of the dedication the Sikhs do to doing good for people with no gatekeeping or expectations of anything other than "you are a fellow human in need and we can help you"

What is happening at Goddard is absolutely devastating. We are losing history. We are losing an incredible amount of human talent, skill, and knowledge. Rebuilding it will be impossible same for same. Industry can not absorb the people or the equipment. This is undoing space science in the US.

@amtrak.com, this is your moment!

Uninstall Grammarly NOW. They've partnered with an AI company and actively scrape your writing to train its models.

NASA may be quietly gutting an iconic campus with what it calls strategic closures, workers fear (CNN) — Alarm is growing among federal workers at NASA’s iconic Goddard Space Flight Center’s main campus in Greenbelt, Maryland — the nerve center for groundbreaking missions like the Hubble

Reposting to correct an error: trump admin is quietly gutting 13 buildings and about 100 laboratories at Goddard campus that has been instrumental to Hubble and James Webb telescope missions. Staff say they’ve be locked and told to move equipment. Anything left behind will be thrown away.

YouTube video by mirrorro77 The Rascals - It's A Beautiful Morning

Good morning, Bsky! m.youtube.com/watch?v=cJqj...

📌

We have them in Gothenburg too! :)

I apparently do this to my family and friends.