bmacastro.bsky.social
Astronomer working on imaging extrasolar planets, instrumentation, and science policy. Spare time involves hiking with a golden retriever, and not playing enough boardgames.
Director, University of California Observatories, but opinions are my own. He/him
210 posts
1,426 followers
418 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
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Technically I am closer to personally developing a nuclear weapon than I was when I was twelve.
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Talking in succession at HWO25 is going to be so much fun!
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Speaking of which, we should figure out a fall visit date so I can be a guest ranter.
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I’m assuming you’re just saying this to troll @markmarley.bsky.social
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You must?
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Awesome! Excellent news for St. Andrew and for you.
And if you ever need someone to come give an amusing colloquium on direct imaging feel free to invite me!
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Well, they didn't say how "reduced scope" it was....
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Is the CH hard (Eh-kal-whats) or soft (Eh-chal-wots)?
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Also, @debbieohi.com has added the Iruvian Blood Squirrel to the lore. Nothing bad can possibly come of this.
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And also through Swaying an exceptionally insane ghost using the Slide's Ghost Voice. Which I had forgotten about. Though the insane ghost ended up possessing someone who was on fire and then charging at the Slide, so I suppose that's still violence.
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Two players had the opportunity to be smug about wearing heavy armor. One ended up with a very artistic set of burns. The mystery of the Insane Ghost Bombs was solved. Largely through violence.
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Yeah, pretty much at the "Attack of the Clones" level of quality.
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I love it! Is it still available?
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Lumber gundam!
(Also, did you ever do an Aerial?)
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Very cool! wish I could have been there.
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PIxie's "Head On"
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With eucharists that shine like justice
And a wine that is dark like tinted glass.
He is woke, Marxist, and sharp as a tack
He is outta Chicago and picking up slack.
I want want a Pope who’s a Cubs fan with a tall hat.
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The original discovery of the system was front page New York Times in 2008, together with the discovery of Fomalhaut b. We’ve been watching these for a long time!
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I also talked with the department about Astro2020 and the landscape of astronomy funding and projects and made it to the end without crying, which I consider to be an achievement.
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Other highlights include the mandatory chile enchiladas with egg, and a very nice hike up Tortuga Mountain with Eric Nielsen and the students of the exoplanet/young stars group, including excellent corgis.
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Fortunately there's actually a considerable literature on extrasolar plants, for example O'Malley-James & Kaltenegger 2019.
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There's also the variation where you add two different frequencies together to get a third brand new frequency. And don't forget the whole "and then we compress the pulse in time and spread it out in wavelength" femtosecond magic.
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Also I find the whole idea (as per the thread) that there are lawyers using LaTeX both brilliant and terrifying.
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Now I just have to remember the difference between a "feed" and a "list" and how the h*ll I interact with them.
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Does it look something like this?
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Lick Observatories Automated Planet Finder. (Which would also be a great way to get more spectra.)
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Question from a non-expert for both of you - is MIRI noise in transit spectra completely white, or would one expect some spectrally-correlated noise (which we see a lot in direct imaging NIRSPEC data), further weakening the statistical significance?
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I think the Taylor note here is still considering noise as uncorrelated, right? Correlated noise (which seems not impossible) would further weaken the significance.
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One! One photon! Two! Two photons! Three, three photons! Four, four photons! Five, five photons! Six, six photons! Seven! Seven photons!
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Doesn't necessarily mean they're counting individual photons but that the signal is directly related to number of photoelectrons produced rather than some more abstract quantity. maybe.
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I'm guessing it just means something as simple as that they're looking at more raw data from their sensor (CMOS?) without automatic gain adjustment or other things that signal chain might do? Or if it's a color sensor, looking at the individual raw pixel values before they get turned into RGB
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The closing sentence is great also: "Thanks to Ben Cassese and Daniel Yahalomi for conversations which assured me I wasn’t totally insane" though I note the question of partial insanity remains unresolved.
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I feel like we're going to need a logarithmic scale for this.
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Really excellent article!
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I can't read the paywalled article, but the NYT headline goes too far. (Though disconnect between headlines and story is an ongoing problem in the NYT in lots of contexts.)