It's only COSPAR if it's from the General Assembly region, otherwise it's just sparkling IAU
08.03.2026 23:09
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It's only COSPAR if it's from the General Assembly region, otherwise it's just sparkling IAU
The author in a high-viz vest standing outside in front of the Rubin Observatory
Oh hi, @vrubinobs.bsky.social! Looking good! 🔭
Everyone can come after me: switching is fine. Getting up in the dark in the winter would suck, but so would summer sunrises at 4am.
stat-us quo! stat-us quo!
Words fail me.
This should be well received.
knee deep in the hoopla
Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers.
The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇
Rubin Observatory has started paging astronomers 800,000 times a night www.scientificamerican.com/article/rubi...
Now that's an evocative way to describe the start of @vrubinobs.bsky.social alerts!
blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/26/t...
Rubin Observatory with open dome under a night sky. Text reads "NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory has released its first world-public alerts. Here's what you need to know. El Observatorio Rubin de NSF-DOE publicó sus primeras alertas públicas a nivel mundial. Esto es lo que necesitas"
Rubin Observatory under a night sky. Text reads "What are alerts? ¿Qué son las alertas? Alerts are a "heads up" that something in the sky changed in brightness or position. Las alertas son "avisos" que indican que algo en el cielo cambió de brillo o de posición."
Rubin Observatory during an orange sunset. Text reads "Does an alert mean a new discovery? ¿Una alerta significa un nuevo descubrimiento? Not necessarily. An alert flags a change in the sky, which could be either a new discovery or a known object. No necesariamente. Una alerta señala un cambio en el cielo, que podría tratarse de un nuevo descubrimiento o de un objeto ya conocido."
Rubin Observatory under a night sky during a long exposure shot, causing the stars to streak. Text reads "Why are these first alerts such a big deal? ¿Por qué son tan importantes estas primeras alertas? Rubin is now a real-time discovery machine, enabling scientists worldwide to follow up within minutes! Rubin es ahora una máquina de descubrimientos en tiempo real, que permite a científicos de todo el mundo hacer seguimientos en cuestión de minutos."
NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory has officially started releasing world-public alerts! 🎉
Here's what you need to know about these first alerts and what's coming up for Rubin ➡️
🔭🧪☄️
A graphic showing the Rubin Observatory as a white observatory building on a dark hilltop. The night sky is in the background, with data alerts dotted across the sky.
Hunting down supernovae in near real time! Last night, the UK data broker Lasair ingested and rapidly processed 800,000 alerts as the @vrubinobs.bsky.social public alerts stream began! Now anyone can observe astronomical events as they unfold thanks to Rubin’s data brokers. What a milestone! 🔭
Who needs doomscrolling when you can have Rubin alerts going off 10x a second all night long?
SO excited to see the first alerts from @vrubinobs.bsky.social being broadcast to the world last night. A huge congratulations to @ebellm.bsky.social and the Alert Pipeline + Data Management teams here at @dirac-institute.bsky.social for their years of hard work!
www.washington.edu/news/2026/02...
Here we go…the marvellous Vera Rubin Observatory has started scanning the sky, telling us about things that change and move. In there there are untold wonders and undoubtedly a few surprises. Let’s go!
Illustrated graphic with the boot-shaped Rubin Observatory atop its site on Cerro Pachón beneath a sparkling night sky and the glowing band of the Milky Way stretching from lower left to upper right. Sprinkled throughout are many "Data alert!" popups, labeled with icons that represent supernovae, asteroids, hungry black holes, and more.
A 3-by-4 grid of grayscale astronomical images zoomed in on single objects. From left to right, the columns are labeled Template, New image, and difference. From top to bottom, the rows are labeled supernova, variable star, active galactic nucleus, and solar system object.
The largest spot-the-difference effort EVER has begun!🚨
On the night of Feb 24, NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory officially released its first ~800,000 public alerts of detected changes in the night sky!🔍
A new era of discovery is here✨ 🔭🧪☄️
🔗: rubinobservatory.org/news/first-a...
Time for another Decadal 🙃
The guys who created Dark Sky and later sold it to Apple are back and have a new weather app out!
apps.apple.com/us/app/acme-we...
We just had three straight weeks when one or the other kid was home with the flu. Thankfully they've gotten better, just in time for midwinter break!
brave move to choose the window
Personally, I'm just happy to see someone in the central admin with a pulse.
🔭 I was disappointed to learn that NASA won't archive @ojastro.bsky.social publications on PubSpace because the journal is not listed in Sherpa Romeo (openpolicyfinder.jisc.ac.uk)
box and whiskers plots of Physics PhD salaries in the private sector and academia, from aip.org/statistics
Getting rich isn't necessary: given academic salaries, the excess provided by median private sector wages would be enough to employ one (or more) postdocs...
www.aip.org/statistics/s...
🔭 I've defaulted to skepticism about the utility of LLMs for new science results. But particle theorists used GPT-5.2 to conjecture and then prove a general formula for gluon scattering amplitudes: arxiv.org/pdf/2602.12176
More from OpenAI here: openai.com/index/new-re...
... plus Intro to Linguistics, The Book of Job and the Joban Tradition, The Rise and Fall of the Russian Avant Garde, Introduction to Drama, and a double major in physics & astrophysics
Man, I miss college!
Tell me five classes you took in college:
Justice
Human Sexuality
Classics of Christian Literature
Self and Identity
Reason and Religion
s/1/! 🙄
🔭 Congrats to the Scialog awardees! Looking forward to seeing some exciting @vrubinobs.bsky.social science very soon1
7. Troublemaker, by El Lissitzky, 1913
