Bill Keel

IIRC spectra of planetary nebulae are particularly good for this.

1981 photograph from Lick Obs Crossley telescope showing twin gravitationally-lensed images of quasar Q0957+561, the first known gravitational lens systen, and foreground reference stars.

Ah, I thought I had a JPEG of this one. Double quasar and surrounding stars (which I had calibrated photoelectrically at Crossley or Nickel) so I could do iris photometry. (One more gizmo younger colleagues won't quite believe).

1979-1982. Using the Crossley 0.9m in its "new" (1919) mount, interleaved with IDS time at the Nickel 1m for my thesis spectra. Astrometry of galaxy nuclei to register with radio detections, plus trying for the time delay in the lensed quasar Q0957+561. Observing at the Crossley was iconic.

Astronomical data over the decades: in printed tables, handwritten logbooks, grocery-tape numbers, photographic plates, DEC TK-50 and 9-track tape reels, and 35mm film frames.

Still life with data formats.

Carrying a box of 9-track tapes back from Chile in hand luggage, making them pass around X-rays, likewise for boxes of 8-inch floppies in San Jose airport or indeed Moscow. Driving down Mt.Hamilton with a box containing a rack of not-yet-dry plates that came out of the fixer at sunrise. Nostalgia.

Telescope dome with outline from The Exorcist movie poster. This is from the time the system clock started running backwards during the night and the control PC being possessed was the most parsimonious explanation.

(Look at LaTX errors from 6 out of 10 manuscript tables despite the fact that they typeset fine) It must be spreading. We already had to go through this process once in taking some of the data - maybe I should have saved that phone number.

US intel thinks USSR is working on nuclear-powered bomber, puts actual reactor in B-36 airframe just to fly around live for practice. USSR sees this and puts one in a Tu-95 (Tu-95LL) as counter move. What could go wrong?

Morbid Fascination with Cold War technological excesses is suddenly whispering "Project Pluto".

Montage of image created from data taken with SARA remote telescopes during DragonCon Live Astronomy sessions 2018-2024. Dumbbell Nebula, nebulae NGC 470 and 346 in Small Magellanic Cloud, Jupiter.Saturn, Condor Galaxy NGC 6872, Tarantula Nebula, M22, Orion Nebula, globular clusters NGC 6822 and 47 Tucanae, planetary nebula IC 5148, surroundings of supernova 1987A, NGC 1566, Crab Nebula, NGC 157, NGC 2146, Eagle Nebula.

I really enjoy hosting the Live Astronomy overnight sessions, where we operate telescopes in AZ, Chile, Canary Islands, sometimes from audience requests. It's real! It's all real! (Truth in advertising, the data do need some processing to look this good). Hope to catch interstellar comet this time.

This will in no way induce me to stop referring to you as one of the youngsters. It's just an arbitrarily-agreed number, right?

Ahh, here's my tentative DragonCon schedule. Live Astronomy each night, right, "Interstellar Objects" seem to be out but "Things that go Bang, Boom, or Boing in the Night" is in. OTOH this early in August even the science track schedules remain somewhere between fantasy and science fiction.

It's like "don't be mad" and "lose the attitude". Always works.

1980s-vintage finding chart for an infrared source (09104+4109) which proved to be the most distant IRAS galaxy known at that time. The image is a Polaroid copy of the Palomar Sky Survey photograph, with the edge of a transparent ruler giving a mm scale (1 mm =67 arcseconds).

This may be the worst part - I had a JPEG of this already for historic reasons. From 1984.

I still have two boxes of finding charts, including the one that led to the discovery that IRAS 09104+4109 is at z=0.44 which was a huge deal at the time. It took other bold folks to call it a type 2 QSO.

OK, I feel slightly responsible, not having saved all the overlay sheets used to find things on the Palomar Sky Survey before taking mass Polaroid (or in real bulk, 35mm) copies. I eventually printed coordinates and names on clear sheets to self-document each one along with the mm ruler for scale.

OTOH some schools don't help by holding kids responsible for things they clearly can't handle so pulling parents in, then when they finally should be responsible themselves, stakes are already high enough to make fouling up a long-term problem.

There was the one where an NSF program officer finds romance. Friend who's been an NSF program officer says "so that makes it fantasy, then!" (BTW he's one of the people who introduced my wife and me, 40 years ago now).

Again, at many places the application portal is disconnected from the department so the department won't know who needs to hear this. (Coordination with the admissions people? Next we'll expect registrars to pick up the phone).

Note for bystanders: this is an artifact of a time decades ago, when scientists communicated by means of "preprints", physical copies of submitted work circulated because submission-to-publication in some journals could take a year.

Ohh. Goodness. I dunno about historical documents, but if archaeologists can learn from shards...

Do you hear a sotto voce chorus of EYE-GEE-EMM, SEE-GEE-EMM? To quote a Senior Review back during FUSE, most of the baryons and maybe most of the metals...

I hear that in the combined voices of Indiana Jones and Sallah: "He's looking in the wrong place!"

"AI" is IT from A Wrinkle in Time.
"Just give in," the AI pushers say. "We can all be together in this. You don't have to think."

Time to hold onto your inner Meg, friends.

I am old enough to have seen a performance by one of Tom Lehrer's "American Musical theater"classes at UCSC. He found musicals for them to perform that I couldn't quite believe had actually been written (ex:"Jupiter Forbid").

R.I.P.
and hoping Alabama doesn't get the Bomb.

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 August 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

Боже мой!

Contemporary and fossil ferns from west Alabama.

The ferns seem to have been native around here for a long time. (Truth in advertising: this was in my back yard, but the older ones came from mine tailings near the county line). I would use this image in classes to illustrate the "how has the Sun shone this bright for so long? question.

Working on visuals for a talk on interstellar objects at DragonCon in 5 weeks. (Thanks to colleagues such as @chrislintott.bsky.social and @astrokiwi.bsky.social for all the simulation detail!). I am now bracing myself for the inevitable inclusion of the AV-lobe phenomenon.

Spiral galaxy NGC 7331, seen highly inclined with feathery dust lanes augmenting the tightly-wound spiral pattern. Bright star above nucleus is type Ia supernova 2025rbx, discovered early this month.

Spiral galaxy NGC 7331, seen highly inclined with feathery dust lanes augmenting the tightly-wound spiral pattern. Bright star above nucleus is type Ia supernova 2025rbx, discovered early this month.

Current SN Ia 2025rbx in NGC 7331 is really bright and in a photogenic spot near the nucleus. (5m each BVR during morning twilight, 1m Kapteyn telescope on La Palma remotely operated by SARA consortium). 🔭

It's out? Wow - congratulations!