Bill Keel

I'm going to expand this statement to say that astronomers should actually look at their data whatever the format. Yes pipelines and high level science products are great, but you learn a lot from just spending some time exploring the counts-on-pixels images, even for spectroscopy. 🔭

"Galaxies We Love" could be a podcast, but it really needs visual aids.

Several Saros ago, I had a professor who pointed us to a stack of plates to practice galaxy classification. Among them was NGC 4361, a spiral-shaped planetary nebula in Corvus. Maybe too devious.

Online passport renewal sounds like a good idea (especially Right Now). We just spent an hour trying backgrounds - freshly painted white wall, projection screen, hanging sheet with no backlighting - and all failed the "background texture or shadow" criterion. It takes a studio, I guess.

Back and white photograph (exposed on a plate) of Comet West from 7 March 1976, showing the brilliant head and striated tail curving to the upper left.

What a reminder. 50 years ago (UT anyway), Vanderbilt Univ. Dyer Obs. 61-cm Seyfert telescope, 5m exposure. It popped out of the morning twilight with just a lttle warning from IAU telegrams.

Observatory aficionados near Tucson (of whom there are many) - the Pima Air and Space Museum is coming up on its spring tour days for the interior of SOFIA, March 20 and 21. (It has a new neighbor, ex-NASA NB-52 complete with X-15 mockup under wing).

Why I avoided the Fediverse trend. It seem too much to work out while trying to get Python environments to work. (Empirically supported by the fact that I still don't have astropy understood by Spyder.)

An inattentive typo. Maybe I should let AI edit my posts that are too long.

In Earth orbit, perigee is the nearest and apogee the farthest. For orbiting the Sun, the closest point is aphelion. Anyway, for @dragoncon.org, happy apocon 2026 and the next one is now closer than the last, (Pls join us overnights in the Hilton for the 20th annual Live Astronomy sessions, BTW).

You could offer class credit for them. Rumor had it that every Lick PhD for a decade found another typo in Osterbrock's gaseous-nebulae textbook. (I think I caught the first one in the 2nd edition, only because I happened to have been working with the emission line whose wavelength was transposed).

Montage of 16 lunar eclipses, partial and total, from 1972-2026. Some show the round section of Earth's umbral shadow during partial phases, others the red hue of totality and background stars. 1st image is from carefully documented series by 14-year-old me.

Eventually it gets to be a habit. I beat the cats (wanting breakfast) out of bed for this one.

Radio image of galaxy PKS 0521-36, in pseudocolor display. There is a bright and sharp core, jet to the upper right with a bright knot, and bright spot opposite the jet.

Ooh! I remember that one! I observed it with the VLA 40 years ago next month. Here it is at 2 cm wavelength - core, jet, and radio lobe on the opposite side. Probably the next-brightest optical/near-IR jet in a radio galaxy after M87.

The Evening Sky Map is a 2-page monthly publication in the PDF format 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 March 2026 edition of The Evening Sky Map (PDF) is now available for download at skymaps.com/tesm/. The PDF features easy-to-use sky maps for the northern & southern hemispheres, and for the equatorial regions. Please share, and enjoy exploring the Universe! 🔭
#stargazing #space

Oh, sure, now it comes out, four days after resubmitting a paper where I needed to work out lengths of radio jets in nearby Seyferts to answer a referee's question and came close to rolling dice for NGC 1068.

JWST operations (among others) have to have flexible plans to adapt to Artemis launches because human missions in deep space have priority for use of the Deep Space network infrastructure. Makes a big difference what the lunar phase is.

Mmmmm. Galaxy overlaps!

Cue my email exchange with David Hogg circa 2009after he wrote that no modern astrophysical discovery has been based solely on visual inspection of data. (All those words are operative)

I've had the experience of having to close a remotely-operated telescope in the Canary Islands due to this calima dust, then a week later looking up from my house 6900 km to the west and seeing the same clouds of dust making the sky milky.

Stares back in "rear-ended in a Pinto at age 17 and met some firemen very quickly".

All according to Hoyle!

Space anniversary notes remind me that the first news event I remember (and my first memory of the "outside world") was 64 years ago today, watching John Glenn's first launch. Had an impact. I found myself on the science team for a 0.4m deep-UV telescope hitchhiking on his 2nd spaceflight STS-95.

Experience has seriously updated my priors in using iPosters at AAS meetings. Update right up to session time, image galleries to show interested people... As a viewer, I really want big-print keywords+images so I can see whether I'm interested before entering the Awkward Human Interaction Radius.

Emailed colleagues pointing out that there is an object sharing some spectroscopic properties of Little Red Dots quite nearby - in the center of a Messier galaxy in Virgo. Could be an informative imposter, or flock of A-type supergiants. (Feels as if it should be accompanied by a Scooby-Doo laugh).

So cool. TDE host galaxes show EELRs (although so far not my favorite gant EELRs) more often than otherwise expected, which means ... something...

Which of us has not pulled in a colleague from another field to behold the the wizardry which is the ADS, then shown how NED and SIMBAD and MAST and IRSA... navigate the dataverse in complementary ways?
Like seeing the reaction of Bulgarian colleagues circa 1990 in the soap aisle at Walmart.

If you form an embouchure and buzz your lips you can probably make some overtones as well... or so I've heard... (cue paleontologist who wrote about on parasaurolophus sounds and got this exact feedback only from brass-playing dino fans who'd studied physics)

"reward of the young scientist is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or to understand something. Nothing can compare with that experience...Reward of the old scientist is the sense of having seen a vague sketch grow into a masterly landscape."

My momentary squirming on checking some of these boxes aside, this does highlight how, during my career, authorship has gradually but significantly shifted from being centered on responsibility to credit. This is all to the good given increasing professionalization and specialization.

Even aside from how do deal with LLMs, he has collected a dense set of pretty deep observations on astronomy and the astronomical community.

I don't understand the problem.