Bill Keel

Maybe it's just age or experience, but my jaundiced eye is firmly expecting an eventual loss of some ADS functionality or other due to resource competition with the upkeep of SciX.

Signed, user who didn't necessarily find new improved ADS interface at all an improvement for humans.

Really ticked me off when the place where we get most of our staples rearranged everything in fall of 2020. Because nothing says "we'll help you get in and out fast to stay healthy" quite like randomly shuffling everything you knew how to find.

The same preprint server which quietly declined to post our RNAAS note in which we find actually existing color-selected things in early Rubin data. Got it.

Well, they do seem farther apart since the Louisville and Nashville Railroad was finally dissolved a few years after I left VU. (Sitting here wearing black and gold and hoping to giggle riotously watching tomorrow's game after seeing 4 full years of terrible football in the band 50 YEARS AGO now)

From collaborator email this morning: "I have deconvolution code and am not afraid to use it (even when maybe I should be)." (Does it even matter whether HST or JWST is the context?)

A pair of galaxies, a large face-on barred spiral galaxy and a smaller edge-on disk galaxy. The upper portion of the frame is dominated by the spiral galaxy NGC 5754. It has a bright, pale yellow, circular core that transitions into an almost vertical bar structure. Two well-defined spiral arms circle around the core counter-clockwise, beginning at the ends of the bar. The arms both complete one revolution around the core and then fade out. They are dotted with pale blue star clusters. At about 5 and 7 o'clock on the bottom of the galaxy, the spiral arms have small kinks, creating what looks like straight segments in the otherwise smoothly curving arms. Overall, the galaxy looks a little like a cinnamon roll. In the bottom left corner of the frame is the smaller companion galaxy NGC 5752. It is oval-shaped, with the long axis almost vertical, running parallel to the bar of the large spiral. On a background of pale yellow stars is a line of blue dots, which are star clusters, running through the long axis in the center of the galaxy. Below this is a dark brown dust lane.

Hubble image of Arp 297, also known as NGC 5754 and NGC 5752.

The pair's interactions created kinked arms in NGC 5754 (the large spiral galaxy) and the blue star clusters in the core of NGC 5752 (the smaller galaxy).

Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage team, W. Keel
Source

The Evening Sky Map is a 2-page monthly publication that features an all-sky map of the night sky, a calendar of celestial events, and a list of celestial objects visible to the naked eye, binoculars and telescopes.

🌟 The October 2025 edition of The Evening Sky Map is ready for download at skymaps.com/tesm/. The PDF features a Sky Calendar and easy-to-use sky maps for the northern and southern hemispheres, as well as equatorial regions. Please share, and enjoy exploring the Universe! 🔭
#stargazing

Today in "everything is connected if you pull hard enough".

Bishop v. Aronov (11th Circuit Court) (1991) The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the University of Alabama's actions to stop a professor from interjecting religious views in a physiology class in Bishop v. Aronov.

Could be considered settled or pushed by the 11th Circuit in 1991 from Bishop v. Aronov, which held that a university has absolute control over what is done in the classroom. (Coulda been but was not argued as a religious-freedom issue, instead basically IP) firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/bish...

Me in journal club today after a student reviewed a bunch of papers on LRDs: "They can't use the same photons for direct UV and IR heating - that would be Enron accou- (looks at ages of grad students) - double counting."

Y'know, I remember when any version of "black holes grew first" was so silly as not to be worth discussing. Then high-z mass estimates started coming in... (and the meaning of "high" kept receding into the reionization fog).

Won't name and shame, but an interesting abstract in #arxiv was just posted using multiple "private" macros for phrases, many pointless math mode tags, and part of the text which was behind a %. Colleagues, think of your readers! (Not much of a pet peeve these days, but if your aim is readership...)

There is a rich and sad history of people "explaining" why we all interpreted that wrong and They Know The Date. (Far from me to speculate whether they actually believe these rationalizations.)

Signed, guy known in church groups for saying "I'd like to represent a responsible opposing viewpoint".

As my advisor said (to someone else), never do anything well that you don't want to do again. Just saying. Muzzle that blasted sense of responsibility.

Black cat sitting on keyboard giving dirty look to extremely fluffy sealpoint cat sitting on my arm, as I contemplate how to bandage my inevitable injuries.

I am making desperate plans to survive a dispute between research assistants.

I dunno, man, the geese remember. Do not mess with them.

Extragalactic astronomer here, one of the handful of people who regularly need to type "spectrophotometry" and never get it right on the first try. (Stares back at that line yet again to be sure). Extremely niche.

Until you get a solution on that, and on the off chance you don't have some already, my about-to-be-68 post-knee-surgery self was amazed at what a wonderful invention litter scoops with 12-inch handles are. We keep one by each of the 4 receptacles.

Ooooohhh. It is.

In comparison, my blanking on even my spotty Dutch and googling "Keel Voorwerp" to check the reach of a press release was positively benign. (The phrase means "throat obstruction"). OTOH trying to find any images from Venus missions for classes got continually trickier.

Exorcism?

My father the newspaper writer will be haunting me for that slip.

My annual musing that my grad advisor built a spectropolarimeter for the Shane telescope with two of the largest natural calcite blocks ever found - and managed to pay a Mexican prospector for them from grant funds. They each had names (which I have, alas, forgotten).

Yeah, it's not his most lucid prose, but then again, he was noted for contemplating darkness.

The Evening Sky Map is a 2-page monthly publication that features an all-sky map of the night sky, a calendar of celestial events, and a list of celestial objects visible to the naked eye, binoculars and telescopes.

🌟 The September 2025 edition of The Evening Sky Map is ready for download at skymaps.com/tesm/. The PDF features a Sky Calendar and easy-to-use sky maps for the northern and southern hemispheres, as well as the equatorial regions. Feel free to share, and enjoy exploring the Universe! 🔭
#stargazing

OK, ready or not, I'm declaring the PPT visuals done for my solo panel on "Stars that go bump, bang, or boing in the night"
for DragonCon Space Track on Saturday evening. With any weather luck, we can show folks ongoing supernova explosions in Live Astronomy overnight each night.

Reminds me of my dissertation advisor, who eventually retired from UCSC to pursue his real passion. He's now a vintner. (A whole series of teetotaling grad students, rare as that sounds, must have been such a disappointment).

This year Alabama opens in Florida (I'm in Tuscaloosa so we hear), but Syracuse/Tennessee on Saturday and Va Tech/South Carolina Sunday have the same vibe. (Once asked in hotel elevator "So are you an actual Tide fan or is that cosplay?" - since our local drugstore carried Cosplay Today magazine!)

If you're too far south for the Potomac, there are streams in West Alabama where Cretaceous sharks can claim one last victim, when your pull your hand out of the creekbed with a tooth stuck into it. (Cue @warondumb.bsky.social with history of why Cretaceous shoreline led to today's state politics)

Wendy and the Xenomorph in Alien:Earth.

ou've been kidnapped. The characters from the last TV show you watched are trying to rescue you. Who's coming to save you?

Ohhhh. Odds 50-50?