For the first time since Nov. 2023, two of the four instruments aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft (currently ~24,472,559,000 km away or about 22.5 light hours from us) have started re-transmitting science data!
These spacecraft are older than me and still going strong.
The summer 2024 NASA's Astrophoto Challenge is now open! This summer's target: Cassiopeia A.
Make your own images with real NASA data using a simple, online tool. Then, submit your image. Standout entries are featured on the website and get comments from expert judges.
The LSST Camera is at the summit. Construction of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is on the path to completion - The camera was the last major piece of equipment/component - still lots to do, but we're getting closer to the start of commissioning and operations with Rubin Observatory and LSSTCam! Well done to all the @VRubinObs construction project and observatory staff and collaborators who made this milestone happen! https://rubinobservatory.org/news/camera-arrives-chile#astrodon
Tomorrow, 23 May, 12:00 CEST, #ESA and the @ec_euclid will present 15 papers, including first #astronomy results:
5x #ESAEuclid reference papers about the main mission, the instrumentation, and related cosmological simulations
10x Early Release Observation #science papers, ranging from ... near to far
At the same time ESA will make 5 new ERO images public and the underlying science images. This programme was observed before the start of Euclid's main survey.
Ex-student paper day! Sutlieff et al. (2024) using a gvAPP coronagraph to suppress diffraction from the primary star so that the variability of a faint substellar companion can be measured to 3% precision and a 3.2 hour periodic variability detected one night but disappears the next! 🔭🪐 #astrodonhttps://arxiv.org/abs/2405.12271
Now it’s time to show y’all the complete photograph of the M16 nebula taken last week with my 80 mm refractor telescope. Could manage to get lots of details in a relatively short total exposure time of only 9 hours and 45 minutes.
(continued):
Reasonably proud of seeing the data in my new suite of simulations with ENZO:
the left panel shows the usual gas temperature, the right one shows the number density of cosmic ray electrons injected by shocks waves assuming diffusive shock acceleration (blue), star formation (red) and active galactic nuclei (green).
Let's notice how star formation dominates (early), but shocks and AGN later dominate the total injection by z=0.
Reasonably proud of seeing the data in my new suite of simulations with ENZO:
the left panel shows the usual gas temperature, the right one shows the number density of cosmic ray electrons injected by star formation (red) and active galactic nuclei (green).
As noted by Arttu Sainio it looks as if #ASASSN-24cf is climbing back to pre-eclipse levels - since the ingress and egress look as if they have the same gradient, I’m guessing this is a large, faint star eclipsing a smaller, hotter star. There’s always something interesting in #ASAS-SN 🔭🪐 #astrodonhttps://x.com/space_r2/status/1792696145803976876
Just beautiful on #astroph today:
"Magnetized Accretion onto and Feedback from Supermassive Black Holes in Elliptical Galaxies" by Guo et al. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.11711
A nomenclature of 'Blue Moon' almost never means a Moon of a blue color but with the summer nights, a literally blue appearing Moon, or Moon in the daytime is a fun one to spot. The northern hemisphere was showing off a bit before sunset, and with the May 23 full Moon so close I couldn't resist a few pictures. Happy lunar viewing! #astronomy#Astrodon#moonlight#lunar#bluesky#bluemoon
Dust, ionized oxygen, sulfur and hydrogen, stars in the making, bok globules, protoplanetary disks, Herbig-Haro objects, immense light-year distances… Ladies and gentlemen: yes the Pillars of Creation @ M 16 taken with an 8 cm aperture refractor.
Another “victim” of my sorting & clearing ahead of our move: five copies of my 1988 University of Edinburgh PhD thesis headed for recycling 😬✌️
But don’t panic: these are all water-damaged & I still have eight clean copies of the one hundred originally printed for me during my first postdoc at NASA Goddard 🚀🛰️
The rest were circulated to colleagues back in the early days of infrared arrays in astronomy 🔭
1112 authors for a space mission 🛰️ reference paper seems ... adequate 🤷🏽😯😁
We, the @ec_euclid will publish five main reference papers aimed at the astronomy community about the #ESAEuclid mission, the #Euclid instruments, both cosmology and other astronomy science possibilities, as well as the cosmological simulations used to test all procedures.
Available coming Tuesday, 23 May, 12:00 CEST (and on arXiv a few hours later). Stay tuned!
Coordination of 100 to 1000 co-authors is actually quite a logistical feat. For this the @ec_euclid has a dedicated membership and author database, to keep contact info and affiliations up to date, and to manage the author lists of already more than 100 publications.
The upcoming release this week has still required a lot of work behind the scenes.