Heidi B. Hammel

A ginger cat rests in a gingerbread cat house

Metatron wishes you all merriment from his gingerbread house

A “Dressbarn” in Muncie, Indiana had been named the inaugural winner of the FIFA “Most Super Glamorous Parisian Haute Couture” award.

Bad framing: ACIP voted to scrap the universal hepatitis B vaccine recommendation for newborns.

Accurate framing: Anti-vax conspiracy theorists appointed to ACIP by Robert Kennedy Jr., who made a fortune as an anti-vax profiteer, voted to expose babies to a preventable, incurable, deadly illness.

Fun. I think this makes it a total of 12 main-belt comets . . .

Today’s “CDC” apparently stands for Center for Disease Continuity. Sad. I miss the old CDC that used fact-based evidence to try to control disease and protect helpless newborns from entirely preventable illness.

It is indeed unfortunate, and probably unnecessary. But the glimmer of good news for astronomy 🔭 is that astronomers are very clever with our processing tools, and so can mitigation much of the noise introduced by excessive satellite spoilage. Some true time-domain science be lost, though.

This is great news that Roman Space Telescope 🚀🔭 is functionally completed! Still some testing, and then Roman will move the Kennedy to be mated with the launch vehicle. Roman is a wide-field Hubble - exciting!

I have eaten
the planets
that were in
the inner solar system
and which
you were probably
saving
for living on

Forgive me
they were delicious
so crunchy
and so warm

!!!!

A colorful berry pie. The crust is painted to look like Kitt Peak National Observatory, scattered with small white telescopes and framed by colorful pie-crust stars.

Happy Thanksgiving :)
@desisurvey.bsky.social

Matt, of course I have a doctor with whom I can correspond on matters of import; but sometimes I have non-consequential questions for which I'd like reliable answers

Since the CDC site can no longer be trusted, what are your alternative go-to sites for science-based medical information. Mayo Clinic? Cleveland Clinic? JHU medical? European sites? Thoughts welcome.

Webb First to Show 4 Dust Shells 'Spiraling' Apep, Limits Long Orbit - NASA Science NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has delivered a first of its kind: a crisp mid-infrared image of a system of four serpentine spirals of dust, one expanding

Very excited to share the NASA/ESA/STScI press release of our team's work on Apep! It's a terrific writeup, complete with a brand new beautiful visualisation of the nebula geometry.
1/? ⚛️🔭🧪
science.nasa.gov/missions/web...

Here are the #I/ATLAS releases from varied NASA/ESA missions. Having worked with such telescope & spacecraft data for 40 years, my perspective is: no surprises. It's a comet; its differences from Solar System comets are intriguing but every comet is different! science.nasa.gov/solar-system...

NASA says "3I/ATLAS is a comet" surprising no one except maybe one guy (who likely still won't accept the conclusions) - press conference still ongoing if you want to tune in

Three #NASAWebb discoveries in ONE! Webb shows there are FOUR dust shells (only one was previously seen), allowing researchers to narrow the stars’ orbit of one another to a LONG 190 years. Plus, they confirmed a third star is part of the “party”: https://bit.ly/4n1tpas 🔭 🧪

Ice Giants Pre-Decadal Survey Mission Study Report The Ice Giants Study was commissioned by NASA to take a fresh look (as of 2017) at science priorities and concepts for missions to the Uranus and Neptune systems in preparation for the third Planetary...

My most important service to solar system planetary science was being a part of the Science Definition Team (SDT), nearly a decade ago, that made the science case for an NASA Ice Giants Orbiter and Entry Probe. Check out our 2017 document: arxiv.org/abs/2511.13946

From @noirlabastro.bsky.social: And here it is… your favorite Image of the Week of 2025! This wonderful Gemini South image topped our charts on social media by capturing a meteor passing by like no other. #astronomy

📸: @GeminiObs/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/P. Horálek

Lunar firefly

The image shows a piece of Mars from the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: these are martian dunes, from a region dubbed Kolhar. A mottled terrain of beige and gray is overlain with very dark gray dust deposits. This patterned landscape was sculpted by aeolian (wind-blown) processes. The image was taken on 25 September 2025, and addresses the science theme of "seasonal processes." Source: https://www.uahirise.org/ESP_089803_2650

Now that the US gov is open, 3I/ATLAS images from the Mars-orbiting HiRISE camera will soon be out. My money is on them looking just like regular cometary images. If that disappoints you, scan the HiRISE catalog for spectacular Mars images like this one uahirise.org/catalog/

A nebula that contains stars and protostars. To the right of center, there is a bright white point made up of two orbiting stars with a four-pronged diffraction pattern. At 2 o’clock from this star, there is another, smaller bright light, a protostar, surrounded by a dark, edge-on disk of matter, which appears as a vertical line. In the center of the image is a cavity where the clouds are thinner and background stars shine through. The stars and protostar are on the edges of this cavity and are surrounded by dark clouds that appear like thick smoke in the light. A thin, short blue jet of material extends roughly horizontally, emerging from both sides of the disk. The jet is interrupted by the cavity and then continues to the left, cutting through the center of the frame.

The brightest point in this Hubble image of FS Tau is a binary system, consisting of two stars orbiting each other, that have cleared much of its surrounding dust and gas away.

Credit: NASA, ESA, K. Stapelfeldt (NASA JPL), G. Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America). 🔭 🧪

That has always been the dream, not just for telescopes but for interplanetary spacecraft as well for good reasons (❤️ for the two Voyager spacecraft, and Spirit and Opportunity on Mars, and more). Alas, NASA's budget simply does not comport with our dreams.

Nah. We want the super-Hubble called Habitable Worlds Observatory! Hundreds of scientists recently met in DC to discuss its remarkable science from our Solar System out to distant galaxies. HWO can answer the question "Are We Alone?" with statistical significance! science.nasa.gov/.../habitabl...

Fig. 2. Initiatives universities should engage in, sociodemographic differences. Dots indicate means, whiskers indicate ±1 SE. Results are based on answers to the question “In your opinion, should universities engage in the following initiatives beyond their core mission (which is to conduct cutting-edge research and educate students)?” with the following answer options: Definitely should engage in/probably should engage in/probably should not engage in/definitely should not engage in.

Fig. 3. Difference in dollars allocated between universities. Dots indicate estimated OLS coefficients from the regressions reported in table S9, whiskers indicate ±1 SE. Dependent variable is the amount allocated to University A, the independent variables are dummies indicating if, relative to University B, A is ranking higher in academic performance, environmental sustainability, DEI, and free speech.

tl;dr = DEI "divide" at universities is driven almost entirely by political ideology (F2 bottom). Both men & women were on average positive re DEI (F2 top); likewise re education level (F2 middle). Re preferred $$ spends (F3)? Men weren't keen on DEI, but political ideology totally dominated.

More details here on the remarkable number of responses to the JWST Cycle 5 call for proposals (2,935 proposals!) here: www.stsci.edu/contents/new...

The figure shows four bar charts representing JWST proposals submitted in Cycles 1 through 5. The plots show the distribution of the Total Number in each cycle (upper left in blue), General Observer requests in each cycle (i.e., request for JWST observations, upper right in purple), Archival requests (i.e., funding to analyze extant data in the archives; lower left in green), and Survey proposals (lower right in red). Surveys are a specialized program of short exposures that fill in gaps in the regular observing sequences, to maximize efficiency of JWST observing (analogous to the Hubble snapshot program).

JWST's recent Cycle 5 call garnered 2,935 proposals (requests to use this amazing telescope and its data 🔭), breaking the record that it set last year! The proposals represent 7,509 unique investigators over a range of career stages, and come from institutions in 59 countries and 47 U.S. states!

The image shows an Earth encircled by many spheres on an orange background. Above the earth image is the name of a podcast "What's Your Map?" and the name of the host "Jerry Brotton". Below the earth is the name of website site "Oculi Mundi" and a celebratory icon noting that "What's Your Map?" won the 2025 Gold Award for Education Podcasts from the British Podcast Awards.

Happy to share that the "What's Your Map?" podcast just won a Gold Award for Best Education Podcast from the British Podcast Awards 2025 - you can find a link to the podcast I participated in about celestial maps via: oculi-mundi.com/heidi-hammel

How two Sydney students are sharpening the view from the James Webb Space Telescope Two Sydney PhD students have found a fix to sharpen the images coming from a key instrument on board the James Webb Space Telescope. Louis Desdoigts and Max Charles are so thrilled, they got a tattoo ...

The team realized they'd overextended their analogies and revised their press release to be more accurate: they developed a software tool to correct electronic distortions due to charge bleed within an infrared detector. It's good work! And JWST is awesome. www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion...

🔭

image description: A star cluster is shown inside a large nebula of many-colored gas and dust. The material forms dark ridges and peaks of gas and dust surrounding the cluster, lit on the inner side, while layers of diffuse, translucent clouds blanket over them. Around and within the gas, a huge number of distant galaxies can be seen, some quite large, as well as a few stars nearer to us which are very large and bright. This new image combines data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory. The dark ring-like outline of the wreath seen in Webb data (represented as orange, yellow, green, and blue) is made up of dense clouds of filled dust. Meanwhile, X-rays from Chandra (red) show young, massive stars that are illuminating the wreath, sending high-energy light into interstellar space. These X-rays are powered by winds flowing from the young, massive stars that are sprinkled throughout the cluster. The extended cloud in the Chandra data likely comes from the overlapping X-ray glow of thousands of young, low-mass stars in the cluster. Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC; Infrared: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, P. Zeilder, E.Sabbi, A. Nota, M. Zamani; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and K. Arcand

I just saw a clickbait article about how "AI helped fix JWST's blurry vision." For the record, JWST's vision is just fine! This article is talking about a quirky mode of one instrument that doesn't work well and which few astronomers use anyway. JWST is doing great - at the peak of its game!