Channon Visscher

This is actually quite brilliant, up to and including the final sentence 🔥

Why is this written as if that statement is just another opinion? What does the actual law say about the matter?

Image of the front entrance of a house, showing bright northern lights above: a green layer of aurora beneath a red aurora

we had spent much of the (chilly) evening in the countryside away from any lights, but my favorite image of the night ended up being the aurora just casually, majestically, filling the sky above our homes

yeah - tear drop shape, and I think the heaviest was 2.5 oz (I have them first weigh in g) Screening out pebbles and smoothing sand surface is better and have them measure rim-to-rim "as self-consistently as possible" Powder is a good idea -or with something like alternating layers of colored sand

one of the things I want to them to see is the effect of kinetic energy in impact geology and conversion of these high energies into (effectively) the violent excavation of the target surface

I have a short class activity exploring the mechanics of impact crater formation and crater morphology. First they drop small weights (fishing sinkers work well!) from various heights into sand beds and record crater diameters as a function of m,g,z, etc. Then end with lighting some firecrackers...

slow-motion capture from a student's phone:

Still image of sand bed with firecracker explosion starting to spread out an ejecta blanket

Teaching some comparative planetology, it turns out that lighting half-buried firecrackers in a bed of sand does a pretty nice job of simulating the formation of impact craters ; ) 🧪🔭

nist.gov and its associated subdomains: incredibly useful and important data, at risk of being lost...

it's something that existed in the population long before widespread recognition - so better diagnosis (and hopefully removal of stigma) would make it seem like there's a huge increase in its occurrence (whether or not that's actually the case...)

Classic plot of the occurrence of left handedness by birth year. The plot starts at 5% in 1890, dips to near 3-4% around 1910 then rises until leveling off at 12% in 1960 onward

I think about this plot all the time, and especially with respect to things like autism. If you’d lived in 1940 and had access to this data, would it feel like an “epidemic” of left-handedness?

To conclude, it looks like the Moon was moved around to give a nice backdrop(s) for the bridge scene ; )

A silly activity but a fun way to review some of the concepts we've been exploring in intro astronomy in order to better understand the relative motions of the Earth, Sun, and Moon!

Belly from TSITP on the padlock bridge on the Seine, with the full Moon above the river in the background.

But in the next scene we see our main character(s) on or near what appears to be the "padlock bridge" on the Seine. We again see the Moon roughly aligned with the river. But the river runs SE-NW here(!) The timing and geometry therefore make it impossible to have the full Moon in this scene.

A picture of the Eiffel Tower at night, with a bright full Moon in the background.

Next, we have a nice shot of the Eiffel Tower with the bright gray full moon in the background. I'm not sure exactly where this is taken from, but the placement of the river suggests from somewhere around the Galeries area(?) That would put the Moon low in the ~southern sky - which is good!

BTW, in these scenes the Moon appears very bright whitish-gray (the way it looks when it's high in the sky), showing essentially no yellowish or reddish coloration from the atmospheric scattering that might be expected at relatively low altitudes (on the order of ~5 degrees here?)

Image of a bright white-gray full Moon hovering above the River Seine and buildings in Paris

The next scene where we see the Moon has to be sometime between 130am and 4am. Here the Moon is relatively low in the sky - a more realistic altitude, but a huge shift in position compared to the previous scene - when when the maximum distance the Moon could have moved is roughly ~45 degrees.

Belly from TSITP looks high into the sky at the Moon

The Moon shining from a partially cloudy sky, looking up from the perspective of a Paris street

Okay: the first issue is that of the Moon's altitude. It is 130 am, and suggested to be midsummer. Belly looks (very) high into the sky and notes a full moon. But at Paris' 48.9N, the highest altitude the Moon could be (near solstice) is about 23 degrees above the horizon ~[90-(48.9+23.5-5)]

The Summer I Misplaced the Moon... #TSITP 🔭

Watching the finale last night I happened to notice a few oddities regarding the placement of the Moon, so I wrote a quick set of review slides to work through with my intro astro class ; )

(other than times/locations, this should be spoiler free)

#jwstcycle5

Screenshot comparing two snippets of the overleaf recompile pane. One shows a document with 56 errors, the other shows a document with 2 warnings.

The two kinds of overleaf authors 🧪

NASA Study: Celestial ‘Accident’ Sheds Light on Jupiter, Saturn Riddle An unusual cosmic object is helping scientists better understand the chemistry hidden deep in Jupiter and Saturn’s atmospheres — and potentially those of exoplanets.

Our (Faherty et al) newly published JWST detection of silane (SiH4) in the brown dwarf W1534 (aka "The Accident")! This molecule isn't seen on Jupiter because it's removed by deep silicate clouds, but unusual chemical properties of W1534 allow SiH4 to be mixed up into the visible atmosphere 🔭 🧪

Your Zodiac Sign Is 2,000 Years Out of Date (Gift Article) Over millennia, our view of the stars has shifted, because of Earth’s wobble. It may be time to rethink your sign.

I wrote about how Earth's wobble causes our view of the skies to shift over time. Here's a paywall-free gift link. With @fparis.bsky.social and @iamrumz.bsky.social

The heartbreaking thing about this
is that there’s already a proven way
to invest lots of money in a knowledge machine
that produces unforeseeable results
that include fantastically profitable ideas
(and some life-saving ones)
and generally benefit society
and this machine is called
a university

This is not the quality of pseudoscience infotainment to which I have grown accustomed Teasing the public with fraudulent or self-deluded promises of aliens used to mean something. It took work. It meant slapping together…

I have a complaint about Avi Loeb's latest work and I want to speak to management.

medium.com/@steve.desch...

Picture of two downed trees, a sumac and maple, in a backyard.

We had an over 99mph(!) derecho pass through last night and lost a few of our favorite small trees. Thankfully house is fine we are all safe & sound!

Image of a poster describing the different Sonora models, including Bobcat, Diamondback, Elf Owl, Flame Skimmer, and Gila monster.

I liked Caroline Morley's Exoclimes poster describing our Sonora model set so much that I'm going to hang up a replica in my office.

A true colour close up image of the dwarf planet Pluto, showing a large dark region to the bottom left and a pale smooth region crossing the equator in the middle right. Taken by NASA's New Horizons probe in 2015.

10 years ago, #OnThisDay in 2015, NASA's New Horizons probe performed the first flyby of dwarf planet Pluto, completing the initial survey of the Solar System. This 'true colour' photo was taken on 14 July 2015, showing numerous impact craters and the large basin of the Sputnik Planitia.

The current administration has more successfully destroyed US science and the scientific enterprise than the hypothetical nuclear weapons program in Iran.

I rarely post personal things. But I need to talk about my 4-year-old niece, Hope.

She has a rare disease. A drug called elamipretide has helped her survive.

But the FDA recently denied its approval.

Now, her health hangs in the balance.

Please share her story & urge the FDA to reconsider. 🧵