Paul Byrne

I don't know for sure, but perhaps a few years? Not very long.

This scene is a composite of two NASA Perseverance rover Right Navigation Camera (Navcam) images taken today, Friday 30 January 2026 at a local Jezero Crater time of just before 2:00 pm.

Colour and white balance adjusted to better match human vision.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Paul Byrne

A rolling, dry, quiet landscape under a butterscotch sky.

Jezero Crater, Mars, earlier today.

The black of space. Some bright, six-pointed bluey features are Milky Way stars. Everything else is a separate galaxy.

Here's another deep field image from JWST.

There's something pretty amazing hidden within it, which I'll talk about next.

But open up this image and lose yourself in this almost impossibly vast view of our Universe.

The six-pointed features are stars in the Milky Way. Everything else is a galaxy.

Cosmic horror.

This image came down from the Curiosity rover on Mars a couple of days ago.

Original (unaltered) image and explanation for why Curiosity is looking at things at night:

science.nasa.gov/resource/cur...

Alien hand glove by Imaginerick on Etsy.

(h/t to @kennen11.bsky.social for pointing me towards this displacement exercise)

This is going to make the Martian astrobiologists insufferable

Cosmic horror.

This image came down from the Curiosity rover on Mars a couple of days ago.

Read more about this image, how it was acquired, and how we know MoM-z14 is the farthest known galaxy (and why it likely won't stay that way for very long), here:

science.nasa.gov/asset/webb/c...

The full image is ~12.1 arcminutes across.

Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/R. Naidu/J. DePasquale

It's all galaxies, remember? Including this one, which is the farthest known galaxy so far discovered. This is what it looked like when the Universe was only 2% its present age.

Here's the really cool thing about this image:

It contains, for now, the farthest known galaxy, ever.

MoM-z14 is so far away, its light has been travelling for more than 13 billion years. We're seeing it as it appeared only 280 million years after the Universe formed.

I mean, holy shit.

It's just galaxy after galaxy. Galaxies all the way down.

The original image is 18,200 pixels across. Bluesky allows a maximum image size of 2,000 pixels.

Here's what a randomly selected, 2,000-px portion of the entire image looks like.

There is ONE obvious Milky Way star in this portion.

The black of space. Some bright, six-pointed bluey features are Milky Way stars. Everything else is a separate galaxy.

Here's another deep field image from JWST.

There's something pretty amazing hidden within it, which I'll talk about next.

But open up this image and lose yourself in this almost impossibly vast view of our Universe.

The six-pointed features are stars in the Milky Way. Everything else is a galaxy.

You had me at "a few Tsar Bombs"

The surface of Mars occupies most of the scene, the limb of the planet to the right (with space beyond). In the upper centre is the massive Olympus Mons. The small dark body is the larger of Mars' two moons, Phobos.

Time to post this rather incredible photo again.

The largest volcano in the Solar System, Olympus Mons, with one of the Solar System's smallest moons, Phobos, crossing it.

Photographed from Mars orbit.

Credit: Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/Andrea Luck @andrealuck.bsky.social CC BY

Screenshot of an X.com post by The Associated Press (@AP) stating that dozens of immigrant families protested for better treatment behind fences at a Texas detention facility, where a 5-year-old Ecuadorian boy and his father were sent after being detained in Minnesota. Below is a video thumbnail showing a crowd gathered outdoors along a fenced walkway; many people wear bright blue or red outerwear, and some hold signs.

After being held in two of them as a boy, I fought for decades urging America to never again build concentration camps and put human beings in them. It breaks my heart to watch this happen twice now in my own lifetime.

Ironclad plan

With this gravitational field they are spoiling us

"...a well regulated Militia, being necessary for the destruction of Enemy Planets..."

I think so. Things like processing huge gobs of image/spectral/mag/gravity data, making enormous mosaics, speeding up complex analysis with multivariate (raster) data, feature recognition and comparison with ML, etc.

In other words, the kinds of things that "AI czars" often *don't* focus on.

Here's my idea for

science

something

Space potato (Phobos) in front of the southern basal scarp of Olympus Mons.

Here's a close-up of Phobos in this scene:

You can see the entire, full-size (17,822 × 6,956) image here:

www.flickr.com/photos/19227...

The surface of Mars occupies most of the scene, the limb of the planet to the right (with space beyond). In the upper centre is the massive Olympus Mons. The small dark body is the larger of Mars' two moons, Phobos.

Time to post this rather incredible photo again.

The largest volcano in the Solar System, Olympus Mons, with one of the Solar System's smallest moons, Phobos, crossing it.

Photographed from Mars orbit.

Credit: Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/Andrea Luck @andrealuck.bsky.social CC BY

That's a nice, clear graphic.

U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office A Science analysis reveals how many were fired, retired, or quit across 14 agencies

Wow. This is devastating.

www.science.org/content/arti...

CHARLES RAFFERTY The Problem with Early Warnings People don't like to leave a party unless the house is actually on fire. Even then, if the flames are far enough away to be pretty, they'll finish their drink, take one more pass at the hors d'oeuvres. How things happen has always been unclear. Hurricanes begin in a place where no one lives. Agents of the government start to wear masks. Fascism is a word my neighbors won't use yet. They are following the law, they say, and the sirens are coming for someone else.

This hit so fucking hard today.

A lot of Dems are going to take Bovino and Noem being fired as the finish line, and it's very important to make it clear to them that it is a starting line