@lyndie.bsky.social
Science writer | Scientific American | New Scientist | NYTimes | Quanta Magazine | #Black Stories on physics, math, astronomy! Also plays trombone.
Waxing moon -- we had a stormy day (with lightning and thunder!) so this is one I took about a month ago.
I just realized that today is Chinese New Year, the 1st day of Ramadan, AND Fat Tuesday. That means the Chinese new moon lined up with the Ramadan crescent and also fell exactly the right amount of time before the Easter full moon.
An extremely rare lineup of 3 major moon-based traditions!
International Women in Science Day fell on Feb 10th. I had the honor of being featured in a blog post by the smart telescope company Vaonis (the brand of telescope I use)!
vaonis.com/blogs/travel...
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It's one of these "smart telescopes". 2" aperture, very transportable. The Seestar range is probably the most popular, but I have a Vespera.
12.02.2026 19:03 β π 0 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0Thanks!
12.02.2026 00:31 β π 1 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0
An oblong red gas cloud with stringy filaments against a black background. There's some blue too from OIII emissions.
Just like the snake-haired Medusa of Greek mythology, this nebula's head writhes with tangled thick filaments, leading to its name, the Medusa Nebula. The result of a star cooling into a white dwarf.
Image credit: my tiny telescope
#science #astronomy ππ©πΎβπ¬
An oblong red gas cloud with stringy filaments against a black background. There's some blue too from OIII emissions.
Just like the snake-haired Medusa of Greek mythology, this nebula's head writhes with tangled thick filaments, leading to its name, the Medusa Nebula. The result of a star cooling into a white dwarf.
Image credit: my tiny telescope
#science #astronomy ππ©πΎβπ¬
It looks a little bit like a Roman amphitheater -- I can at least see the illusion of steps.
31.01.2026 04:18 β π 1 π 0 π¬ 1 π 0Gorgeous shot! I can see the crater clearly. Mine was taken in California.
30.01.2026 23:29 β π 1 π 0 π¬ 1 π 0Remarkable!
30.01.2026 23:09 β π 1 π 0 π¬ 1 π 0Lucky shot! Looks like it was also taken last night.
30.01.2026 15:08 β π 1 π 0 π¬ 1 π 0Thanks!
30.01.2026 15:08 β π 1 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0"...Aristarchus has brought out a book consisting of certain hypotheses... His hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the sun remain unmoved, that the earth revolves about the sun on the circumference of a circle, the sun lying in the middle of the orbit..." -- Archimedes, _The Sand Reckoner_
30.01.2026 04:10 β π 7 π 1 π¬ 1 π 0Gorgeous image!
Can you believe, that in the next weeks to a few months, there are going to be four humans which are going to go in a spaceship and sail around the other side of this other world that just hangs in our sky.
Go look at the Moon.
Four people will be on the other side of it soon.
An 87% full moon with a bright spot on the lower left.
See the solitary bright crater on the lower left? It's named after Aristarchus of Samos, who proposed that the Earth orbits the sun 1,800 years before Copernicus. An unbelievably insightful idea for its day (sadly ignored).
Image taken tonight by my tiny telescope.
#science #history ππ©πΎβπ¬
A drooping string of glowing galaxies. They only appear to line up as seen from Earth. If you were able to look from a different angle, they wouldn't appear to be spaced so closely together. On the lower left is M87, a bright galaxy with a supermassive black hole. It coincides with the dark-matter-dominated gravitational center of the Virgo Cluster.
The beautiful Markarian chain, a drooping string of distant galaxies. And the loner who refuses to join the party, M87 on the lower left, hiding a supermassive black hole inside its heart.
Image credit: my tiny telescope
#science #astronomy ππ©πΎβπ¬
Not many connect math and Dr. Martin Luther King. But in 7th grade, I saw my geometry teacher silently weep through the school's MLK Day assembly, hiding his eyes behind a napkin. An unintended gesture that placed a symbolic welcome mat in front of his math-covered chalkboards.
19.01.2026 23:59 β π 18 π 0 π¬ 1 π 0π² did you ever chat with him?
17.01.2026 08:50 β π 0 π 0 π¬ 1 π 0Thanks!
17.01.2026 08:39 β π 1 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0Thank you
17.01.2026 08:39 β π 1 π 0 π¬ 2 π 0Thank you
16.01.2026 18:04 β π 1 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0Thanks!
16.01.2026 16:34 β π 0 π 0 π¬ 0 π 06:45am about 1 hr southeast of San Francisco!
16.01.2026 16:34 β π 1 π 0 π¬ 1 π 0Thanks!
16.01.2026 16:24 β π 1 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0Maybe we were looking at the moon at the same time?
16.01.2026 16:23 β π 2 π 0 π¬ 1 π 0
A sliver of a moon in an orange sky. A lone silhouette of a tree on a mountain.
Good morning from the moon...
16.01.2026 15:42 β π 1608 π 148 π¬ 28 π 7Anytime the sky is clear, it's up on the roof looking at something!
12.01.2026 19:08 β π 2 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0Thank you!
12.01.2026 19:05 β π 1 π 0 π¬ 0 π 0Thanks!
12.01.2026 02:25 β π 1 π 0 π¬ 1 π 0
A densely packed image of fuzzy circular shapes. Most are galaxies, not stars.
The Perseus Galaxy Cluster. A thousand galaxies trapped inside a cosmic web of filaments containing hundreds of thousands more.
Image credit: my tiny telescope
#science #astronomy π©πΎβπ¬π
A galaxy with a horizontal core and outer rings at a 45-degree angle.
History forms when order breaks. In this case, NGC 660 is wearing its history at an angle. Long ago, a collision yanked its outer arms away from the core, leaving a warped galaxy, which still manages to hold itself together.
Image credit: my tiny telescope (about 15 hrs)
#science #astronomy π©πΎβπ¬π
