@craig.deforest.org
Dad, mountaineer, heliophysicist. I lead the PUNCH space mission and direct a team at SwRI. I like science, space, communication, humans, dogs, horses, puns. Lowering barriers and promoting open science are priorities. My personal account; my opinions.
Funny how odd corners of the language pop up from time to time. Today I was reminded that at least a dozen English words (beak, peak, peck, peek, pica, picante, pick, picket, [mag]pie, pike, pique, and poke) all derive from the same original root meaning "pointy". #etymology
Craig DeForest removes a giant red tie he is wearing. The tie reads "REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT". The photo was taken a few days before the launch of the four PUNCH spacecraft into low Earth orbit, on a Falcon 9 rocket.
This was a year ago. A week after that, we launched PUNCH! 🛰️🔭☀️
Craig DeForest sits in the operators’ chair in front of the operating console at the Reed Research Reactor.
This week I visited Reed College, my alma mater from the 1980s. Highlights included dinner with the physics department (including Mary James and David Griffiths) and touring my old haunts at the Reed Research Reactor. Wonderful department - highly recommended. ⚛️🎢🧐
Title bar of "Polarization Diagnostics Applied to Coronal Mass Ejeections and the Background Solar Wind", a newly published paper in the journal Solar Physics
<thud>! Another PUNCH paper dropped today! Congratulations to Sarah Gibson on this omnibus theoretical treatment of polarization in solar wind structures. Given the simplicity of the Thomson scattering mechanism, it's pretty amazing how deep the rabbit hole can go. 🧪☀️⚛️🔭🛰️
bit.ly/4qT9Kvs
To my Portland friends: I'm returning to the Reed campus this week, to give the physics seminar (and a special guest lecture on image processing). If you're in the area and would like to connect, DM me -- it's been a long time since I've seen most of you.
www.reed.edu/physics/semi...
Today I had the amazing opportunity to view @swri.org's second printing (1710) of Galilei's "Dialogo". It once belonged to a "Vittorio", who scrawled his name on the flyleaf. Nice to think that, as scientists, we're part of a long story populated with like-minded folks across the years. #rarebooks 🧪
PUNCH data are spectacular — but the metadata (data about the data and about the spacecraft that collect them) are also pretty cool.
☀️🔭🧪
Scientific illustration is still not accessible to the big AIs. Here's a prompt I gave Gemini (after asking it if it could generate SVGs), together with the absolute nonsense it produced in response. #AIslop #wut #gemini
Congratulations!!! Here's to some successful science!
It's amazing how slow they look from that far away -- at 15-20 G's on launch, the Black Brant takes off like an overcranked Meatloaf album! From close in, they look nothing like the big orbital launches which are much slower to lift out.
A United Airlines aircraft is being refueled at an airport gate. A fuel truck is parked just beyond the airplane's wingspan, and jet fuel flows through a long hose into the plane as a technician stands on a ladder just under the wing to monitor the connection.
I caught this rare picture of the contrail compound being loaded on an aircraft! The plane's contrail generator (1 of 2) is the large nacelle to the right of the workman. A chemical reaction inside it creates CO2 but also dihydrogen monoxide, which makes visible trails in the air. #chemtrails
Excellent! This is a wonderful find!
I only saw it because Jim Wild (@jim-wild.bsky.social) reposted it with hashtag #spaceweather -- so the #heliophysics feed picked it up. Hashtagging #geomagnetic would work also.
@televueoptics.bsky.social you should make sure to read the Acknowledgements!
It's not every day you get to announce a new research article -- especially one you've worked on for a complete solar cycle. The PUNCH article came out in the journal Solar Physics today! ☀️🛰️🔭🧪
rdcu.be/e0XlR
This is actually very cool. Coronagraphs that "create artificial eclipses in space" date to the late 1960s and many still operate (PUNCH, CCOR, SECCHI, LASCO). ASPIICS uses two separate spacecraft. MESOM will actually use the Moon itself as an occulter: a true "artificial eclipse in space". 🧪🛰️🔭☀️
Hey @officialbenshapiro.bsky.social, how do you feel about this quote now?
We're finishing up the rollout of Version 0j of the #PUNCH data, and several very cool science papers are in progress. Here's a very cool result on #Comet #Lemmon and the #solarwind! 🔭☀️🛰️🧪
The @nytimes.com opens with this plot today. I found it shocking until I realized what the data are really telling us. We simply have no "shared truth" (and haven't for some time). Folks literally do not see the injustice. This plot is the consequence of heavily curated "news" (e.g. #FauxNews).
Congratulations, Tanja! Also, thank you. Journal editors remain underappreciated – curating each journal is a difficult job that is very important for the health of the field!
Hi, @science.esa.int! Oddly, your post wasn't picked up by the #heliophysics feed even though we do scrape the firehose for relevant skeets. If you'd like to make sure you get seen by heliophysicists, you can use the hashtag or else reply here to register; then the "☀️" character will get you on.
A plot of climate change vs. solar brightness shows that the Sun has been ever-so slightly (0.1%) fainter over the last 20 years than the long term historical average. It is expected to brighten back up to the long-term average, over the next solar cycle or so.
Yes, indeed! Here's a plot shown by Dr. Sami Solanki, winner of the #AAS Hale Prize, in 2022. It compares solar brightness to Earth's climate shift. For 20 years the Sun had been ~0.1% fainter than its long-term average, reflecting weak activity in the last two cycles. We don't (yet) understand why.
I sincerely doubt that aurora was seen in Alabama (latitude 32°). We barely saw it here in Colorado, at 40°. The radiation storm was no joke, though.
BTW, since you mentioned "geomagnetic storm" the #heliophysics feed picked up your post! If you aren't aware of us you might like to follow.
This reminds me of the warning sign I saw last year at Surf Beach, CA -- which, now that I think of it, is a good indicator of a healthy (aka neglected-by-people) ecosystem.
I'm glad they were so specific with the sign: sighted sharks are much more dangerous than blind ones.
"Americans can always be relied upon to do the right thing ... after they've tried everything else."
Wow! You have got to see the spectacular prominence eruptions in this latest movie from the European PROBA-3 mission! Congratulations to Andrei Zhukov and his team! 🧪🛰️🔭☀️
Glad to see that #NASA is about to dispose of four more of those darned #RS-25 engines. SSMEs were a great idea in the 1970s, but they're optimized wrong (for maximum ΔP/Δm, not for maximum ΔP/$).
Sometime recently, #starlink quietly updated their #ToS and opted all users in to allowing shadowy "trusted collaborators" to train #AI on your #personal-info information. There's an opt-out option in the configuration settings, if you don't want this to happen.
We had a great time when my son and his girlfriend came to visit over the holidays. Encountered a little turbulence in downtown Denver. #train #turbulence #illusions
Congratulations, @mathewjowens.bsky.social! Many thanks (again) for your longstanding support of #heliophysics!