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Ryan White

@astroryan.bsky.social

1.2K followers 430 following 380 posts

Astrophysics student at Macquarie University, retired artist, bread obsessed. Studying cool (but actually quite hot) stars 🌟 @astrobites.bsky.social author 🪐 i have art too! @ryanwhiteartist.bsky.social 🖌️ ryanwhite1.github.io (he/him)

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Ryan White @astroryan.bsky.social · Jul 22

Exciting news! My second first-author paper is out on the arXiv today!! arxiv.org/abs/2507.14610

We present a brand new JWST image of the Apep colliding wind binary in the mid-infrared, and we study what this nebula can tell us about the THREE stars in it's centre. Read on for more... 1/?🔭🧪

$The image shows a false-colour image of the Apep colliding wind nebula as taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in the mid-infrared. In the centre of the image, there is an orange-coloured spiral coil of dust, not dissimilar in shape from a snail's shell. There are two concentric repeats of the coil that are larger and encompass the inner shell, and these further out shells of dust are coloured red and get dimmer as they get further from the centre of the image. These far out coils of dust look somewhat like translucent spheres. At the very centre of the image is a small spikey object which are the three stars in Apep that create and hide behind the dust shells. There are stars scattered throughout the image, each with a snowflake-like 'point spread function' that spreads the central brightness of the stars into diffraction spikes. Image credit: Shashank Dholakia for R M T White et al 2025. 'The Serpent Eating Its Own Tail: Dust Destruction in the Apep Colliding-Wind Nebula'. PI: Yinuo Han.$

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Conor @ernekid.bsky.social · 6d

Having fun with Letterboxd Lists

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Shashank Dholakia @astroshashank.bsky.social · 3d

And as a bonus, here's a false-color composite of the same. Blue is mapped to all of visible, green is infrared beyond 850nm, and red is the methane band at 889nm.

🔭 #astrophotography #saturn

An azure planet on a stark black background with neon orange-pink rings seen nearly edge-on.

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Shashank Dholakia @astroshashank.bsky.social · 3d

Been imaging Saturn while its rings are nearly edge-on and tried some infrared filters. At this 889nm methane band, Saturn strongly absorbs light, whereas its rings scatter equally across wavelengths.

Also a good visual demo of how astronomers measure exoplanet atmospheres!

🔭🧪 #astrophotography

Three images of Saturn from top to bottom: First, a standard RGB color image showing the rings nearly edge-on at about a 30 degree angle. Middle, a black and white image similar to above, but a little sharper taken with a filter that allows only wavelengths longer than 850nm. Lastly, at bottom, the rings seen as starkly white and the planet dark. This is a very narrow wavelength range of about 20nm centered on 889nm where methane absorbs light, making Saturn itself appear dark and the rings bright.

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lauren @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com · 2d

got a nice email from someone in austria asking me to rotate a Leberkässemmel, an austere meatloaf and mustard sandwich on kaiser roll i was previously unfamiliar with. i figured what the hell, let's rotate it and rotate it fast

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Ryan White @ryanwhiteartist.bsky.social · 3d

I'm delving quite heavily into digital art for the first time and it's amazing to me how streamlined it makes everything. The atmosphere gradient here would have taken me *hours* with physical media, but took about 10 minutes with Clip Studio Paint. I'm in awe

A heavily work-in-progress image of a sunrise ocean painting I'm working on as viewed in the Clip Studio Paint interface. There is a large block of blue on the bottom which will *eventually* be ocean waves. The upper half of the canvas has a smooth sunrise gradient, going from reddish at the bottom, to desaturated yellows, to soft blues/greens at the top. There are blocked in clouds along the horizon.

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Ryan White @astroryan.bsky.social · 3d

i just had a look at the materials i need to teach for a data science course this week and the lecturer teaches students to do
`fig, ax = plt.subplots(...)
ax.plot(...)`
rather than
`plt.plot(...)`

i have never been so happy

Ryan White @astroryan.bsky.social · 5d

you definitely want to see One Battle After Another in the cinema. good lord.

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Ryan White @astroryan.bsky.social · 7d

I remember they did follow up observations of NGC 1514 just for the press release image too! Good sleuthing

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Ryan White @astroryan.bsky.social · 7d

im tired boss

The Verge @theverge.com · 10d

Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Excel and Word

Vibe working is all about Office’s new Agent Mode.

buff.ly

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Ryan White @astroryan.bsky.social · 7d

i would die for Sultana

Ryan White @astroryan.bsky.social · 7d

well this just makes me equal parts furious and sad

Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.bsky.social · 7d

The Sora thing is so bleak and shows how far we've come from AI companies pretending they did not train on copyrighted material

www.404media.co/openais-sora...

OpenAI’s Sora 2 Copyright Infringement Machine Features Nazi SpongeBobs and Criminal Pikachus

The main use of Sora appears to generate brainrot of major beloved copyrighted characters, to say nothing of the millions of articles, images, and videos OpenAI has scraped.

www.404media.co

Reposted by Ryan White

Shashank Dholakia @astroshashank.bsky.social · 8d

New paper by me and @benjaminpope.bsky.social! How well can we map a star using optical interferometry?

This is just a submitted preprint at the moment--comments and questions welcome! (1/N)

arxiv.org/abs/2509.25433

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Ryan White @astroryan.bsky.social · 8d

the artist:

A screenshot of a Jupyter Notebook cell, showing multi-coloured computer code filling the screen. The image is intended to look very complicated with all of the Python code and notable lack of any commenting.

Ryan White @astroryan.bsky.social · 8d

The art:

A scientific visualisation showing the structure of a colliding wind binary. There is a large spiral, showing anti-clockwise motion, with several labels for key features of the spiral. There are two concentric bow shocks, labels indicating that the outer shock is the '1st' and the inner shock is the '2nd'. Labels point to the leading and trailing edge of each shock according to the wrapping motion. There is an inset for the central region of the image, showing that there are two stars at its centre.

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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 10d

here are some helpful steps for academics who are considering creating genAI images to use for lab branding:

1. don't

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Shashank Dholakia @astroshashank.bsky.social · 10d

Tawny Frogmouth. Looks like a cross between a muppet and an owl. Possibly one of Australia's weirder birds.

Taken with Canon R5 & 300mm f4 on Aug 31

#birds #NaturePhotography #Nature #ausbird

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Jon Walker @jonwalkerpdx.bsky.social · 11d

This is literally what the actual "siege" of the auxiliary ICE building looks like

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James Davenport @jradavenport.com · 12d

This week began my new grad class on time domain astro. Wrapped first class with an activity: campfire stories, draw the light curve of a camp fire. Students had a ton of great intuition and I hope it sets the stage for some critical data analysis! 🔭🧪⛺️🪵🔥

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Henry Segerman @henryseg.bsky.social · 14d

New dice from The Dice Lab (me and Robert Fathauer), which may (?) be useful if you regularly write equations. youtube.com/shorts/fgMox...

Dice with greek letters on the faces, on a sheet of paper with a very long equation on it.

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Ryan White @astroryan.bsky.social · 14d

For those of you who don't know, I used to be a professional landscape artist! I've made an account for my art here on bsky, and I'll be trying to post a painting every day from my back catalogue. Follow to see how I developed as an artist over the years!

Ryan White @ryanwhiteartist.bsky.social · 14d

For my first post, here's my first ever painting. I followed Bob Ross tutorials religiously, watching them for months before I even picked up a brush. I wouldn't be an artist without him.

#1 - Oil on 16x20" canvas (pre-stretched), completed in December 2016.

An oil painting of an imagined Alaskan/Canadian mountain scene. In the background is a towering snowy mountain, the midground a dense pine forest and a deep blue lake, and in the foreground some detailed pine trees with dense and tall grass.

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Ryan White @astroryan.bsky.social · 18d

This is my favourite processing of it that I've seen! Wonderful job

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Thomas Carpentier @thocarp.bsky.social · 18d

The JWST had a new look into the IC348 star forming region last year, and here's my processed image of that observation! 🔭

IC348 is located some 1,000 light years away from us and is made of hundreds of new stars born there.

HD: flic.kr/p/2ruCvCz

A focus on a star forming region seen in infrared light. Hundreds of white dots, big and small ones, can be seen everywhere in the image as they are stars! A lot of gas can be seen in the image, covering almost every part of it. This gas is what is helping the new stars to be formed there. In the upper left part, multiple jets can be spotted: they are stars being born at this very moment! A lot of background galaxies can also be spotted in the whole image

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Ryan White @astroryan.bsky.social · 21d

Saw this on the arxiv yesterday and it’s super interesting work!! Great read

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Sophie Newman @sophienewman.bsky.social · 21d

I'm excited to announce that after two years, my Masters project has finally been submitted to MNRAS and is available to read on arXiv! 1/4

arxiv.org/abs/2509.10674

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Ryan White @astroryan.bsky.social · 25d

anyway here's the .png export from powerpoint in question

a digital artwork of two jellyfish in the open ocean, of species Chrysaora hysoscella., as drawn by me in Microsoft Powerpoint. The jellyfish have round bodies, with dark stripes on their hemispherical body, with both long stringy tendrils and also broader softer tendrils (sorry I don't know the technical terms lol). They are orange and light brown against a deep blue background.

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