derkal.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Come join us at Surrey! Please get in touch with questions on any of the fellowships (junior to senior), and if you're interested but not sure what you're eligible for, contact me. 🔭

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Wow, look at that increase in depth!

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Introducing...your sneak peek at the cosmos captured by NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory! Can you guess these regions of sky? This is just a small peek...join us at 11am US EDT for your full First Look at how Rubin will #CaptureTheCosmos! 🔭🧪 #RubinFirstLook ls.st/rubin-first-look-livestream

submitted 6 days ago • 22 comments

Considering a senior UK fellowship (ERF, URF)? We have a great group at Surrey and our internal deadline for the ERF is July 8th. We are looking for a light-touch application: CV and 1 page research statement. I'm the contact person, so send questions/material to me www.ukri.org/what-we-do/d... 🔭

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

Really good set of slides about how Nazi scientists did very little to combat the Nazi party

submitted 28 days ago • 0 comments

An astonishing headline reporting on new observations from a team led to Nikku Madhusudhan claims they’ve found ‘hints of life’ on a planet orbiting a dwarf star some 124 light years away. What’s going on? (1/n) www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... 🔭 🧪

submitted 73 days ago • 26 comments

Bullying at Cambridge University There's a long article in today's Observer about bullying at Cambridge University, which I encourage you to read, as it shows that the scale of the bullying problem in Cambridge is very worrying. I'll just emphasize a couple of things here. One is that Cambridge…

submitted 77 days ago • 3 comments

I tried to image the Palomar 5 globular cluster with a Seestar S50 for 3 hours. The cluster is the middle of this image and some of the faintest stars have Gaia G mags of ~17.5 and the right proper motions to be Pal 5 stars. 🔭

submitted 78 days ago • 0 comments

Great book review by @chanda.bsky.social about another disappointing physicist, Roger Penrose, who didn’t treat their family or female students well.

submitted 86 days ago • 0 comments

Spent 4 hours on NGC 4631 (top galaxy, aka Whale galaxy) and NGC 4656 (bottom galaxy, aka Hockey stick galaxy) with a seestar last night. The hook in NGC 4656 is due to an interaction with other galaxies in the group. 🔭

submitted 90 days ago • 1 comment

Today’s solar eclipse from the southern UK. It was taken with a seestar 50. I was very impressed how well it kept the sun centered in the timelapse! 🔭 youtube.com/shorts/f-wsa...

submitted 92 days ago • 0 comments

Reposting to 🔭

submitted 92 days ago • 0 comments

Denis Erkal (@derkal.bsky.social), one of our contributors, is an expert in galaxy modeling at the @uniofsurrey.bsky.social He has given a talk focused on the Milky Way’s formation and dark matter properties 🌌 #ARRAKIHS #GalaxyModels #DarkMatter #MilkyWay

submitted 93 days ago • 0 comments

Paper day with a paper led by Connor Hainje: arxiv.org/abs/2503.15589. We studied how different the Sagittarius stream would look in self-interacting dark matter. In SIDM, ram pressure can evaporate Sgr's dark matter halo, leading to rapid mass loss, which changes the stream morphology. 1/ 🔭 🧪

submitted 100 days ago • 1 comment

I also got this nice image of the Orion Nebula. The framing options are quite nice on the seestar and are great for large objects on the sky. 🔭

submitted 119 days ago • 0 comments

I played a bit more with our department’s seestar and got this image of M3. The AIdenoise seems to pick out the stars resolved in the original image quite well. 🔭

submitted 119 days ago • 0 comments

Congratulations to Bob Wald for winning the Albert Einstein medal! physicalsciences.uchicago.edu/news/article...

submitted 133 days ago • 4 comments

Had some fun tonight learning how to use one of our department’s seestar telescopes. They’re super easy to set up and use. I think our students will enjoy imaging galaxies with these! 🔭

submitted 149 days ago • 0 comments

UK universities desperately need the government to wake up to the crisis unfolding in the higher education sector. Income has been throttled for a decade and now parts are dying

submitted 152 days ago • 1 comment

The ESA #Gaia mission has delivered the best Milky Way maps to date and taken its last starlight before spacecraft retirement 🔭 www.esa.int/Science_Expl...

submitted 165 days ago • 46 comments

Farewell Gaia! It’s impressive how much we’ve learned from just 33 months of data and I can’t wait to see what else is hiding in the full data!

submitted 165 days ago • 0 comments

Congratulations to my PhD student Madison Walder on her successful viva!

submitted 199 days ago • 0 comments

New submitted paper day! Led by @redshiftless.bsky.social, with me, @chrislintott.bsky.social, Simon Portegies Zwart, and four of the postgrad students in our group. We explore a beautiful new phenomena: what happens to interstellar objects as they drift out from their star & wander the Galaxy? 🔭🧪🧵

submitted 216 days ago • 2 comments

Two postdoc positions on gravitational waves at Nottingham with Stephen Green 🔭

submitted 221 days ago • 1 comment

🚀 I'm hiring--two postdocs and a research software engineer (RSE) to work with me on gravitational waves and machine learning at Nottingham! The posts are funded by my UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship. Postdocs: jobs.nottingham.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx... RSE: jobs.nottingham.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx...

submitted 237 days ago • 1 comment