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Jason Wright @astrowright.bsky.social · 1h

It’s too bad the Nobel committee had already printed up all of this year‘s materials when he finally made it. Now he’ll have to wait a whole year for his trip to Stockholm.

Jason Wright @astrowright.bsky.social · 19h

Kurtjmac reached the Farlands!

www.tomshardware.com/video-games/...

Incessant gamer reaches fabled edge of Minecraft map after more than 14 years — has been walking towards mythical 'Far Lands' at the edge of the map since 2011, covering 12,500km in-game

It's the journey, not the destination.

www.tomshardware.com

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Jason Wright @astrowright.bsky.social · 6h

Agree! When hired, I negotiated no more than 4 new class preps before tenure, and I continue to ask for the same 4 classes in my 2-year rotation.

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Jason Wright @astrowright.bsky.social · 6h

Strongly depends on what you're starting from! If it's Astro 101 or something with a strong documented tradition, I'm never afraid to start with someone else's notes/slides/syllabus which helps a lot.

But yes, for a brand new course that sounds about right, if not low if you're writing fresh HWs.

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Jason Wright @astrowright.bsky.social · 19h

Kurtjmac reached the Farlands!

www.tomshardware.com/video-games/...

Incessant gamer reaches fabled edge of Minecraft map after more than 14 years — has been walking towards mythical 'Far Lands' at the edge of the map since 2011, covering 12,500km in-game

It's the journey, not the destination.

www.tomshardware.com

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Jason Wright @astrowright.bsky.social · 1d

I think about its lessons constantly because I write every day—mostly emails, but also papers, proposals, blog posts…

I have also found that thinking about writing well forces me to organize my thoughts and the logic of my arguments and makes me a more careful and rigorous scientist.

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Jason Wright @astrowright.bsky.social · 1d

The course from my undergraduate days that I use most often in my job by far is Intermediate Composition, where I learned to write essays. Obviously the physics and math (and astronomy) were foundational, but that course has proven the most useful.

David W Hogg @hogg.bsky.social · 1d

Excellent piece by @briles34.bsky.social on writing in the discipline. It’s depressing that we think that theoretical physics expertise is not just more important but INFINITELY more important than writing to… *writing* PhD dissertations (on any subfield of astro, say). arxiv.org/abs/2510.03493

Surveying the State of Writing Education in Physics and Astronomy

Writing is a critical skill for modern science, enabling collaboration, scientific discourse, public outreach, and more. Accordingly, it is important to consider how physicists and astronomers are tra...

arxiv.org

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Jason Wright @astrowright.bsky.social · 2d

Neat! Who is speaking in this video?

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Reposted by Jason Wright

Simeon Schmauß @stim3on.bsky.social · 2d

I guess some proof can't hurt:
With proper processing of that image and don't just showing the raw version which is super noisy, you can see some familiar stars like Arcturus and the the big dipper.
And that streak is turns out to be exactly where Phobos was in the sky...

Processed version of the Perseverance Navcam image from Sol 1643 with all the noise removed. It shows a much larger area of sky than the infamous raw image because it was stitched from 16 individual tiles which are sent separately.
It shows a dark sky with a couple of stars sprinkled around. The brightest is Arcturus at the top center, and the handle of the big dipper can be seen below. On the left is a bright streak with a halo, this is the moon Phobos.

Sreenshot from Stellarium showing the same Starfield with a red box indicating the FOV of Nacam (not considering the Fisheye nature of that lens).
The stars match up perfectly with Navcam, especially Phobos can be clearly identified as such.
Comet 3I/Atlas is marked in red and should be in the middle of the frame, but is so much darker than any stars in the actual Navcam image that it will be impossible to detect there.

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Jason Wright @astrowright.bsky.social · 2d

[I actually totally missed this because it seems he's dropped me from his mailing list!]

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Jason Wright @astrowright.bsky.social · 2d

Wow, this is amazing. Apparently the pictures Avi posted on Medium of 3I/ATLAS from Mars with his amateur image analysis and astrometry are

a) Wrong and

b) Not even of 3I/ATLAS!

Simeon Schmauß @stim3on.bsky.social · 2d

No Avi, that Perseverance Navcam picture you posted isn't showing 3I/Atlas, it's just Phobos, the brighter one of Mars' moons.

If you were even half the expert you think you are, this possibility should have been quite obvious and worth mentioning.

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Reposted by Jason Wright

Tod Lauer @todlauer.bsky.social · 2d

The effort put into understanding 3I/Atlas has been spectacular, imaginative, professional and well-organized. Planetary scientists don't need Avi Loeb put in charge of an international directorate to tell them how to do their jobs.

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Reposted by Jason Wright

Michele Bannister @astrokiwi.bsky.social · 2d

Just going to say that it is hurtful when a systematic study effort by the global small-body community, with many of the campaigns led by women, with results being pushed to free open-source arXiv & data repos for scicomm as quickly as possible, is described as lacking coordination/communication

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Reposted by Jason Wright

James Davenport @jradavenport.com · 2d

I’m a loud voice in support of ISOs as technosignature targets. There’s no thought policing or gatekeeping going on. A tenured prof at the richest Uni in the world isn’t being silenced. THE headline here is: disrespect & arrogance of a loud voice, dominating over earnest work and community

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Reposted by Jason Wright

Meg Schwamb @megschwamb.bsky.social · 2d

I'll for global coordination for ISO follow-up, but it's telling that no one who's actually coordinating follow-up was actually asked to participate in this proposal or thought of to be even suggested as names on committees in this proposal

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Reposted by Jason Wright

Meg Schwamb @megschwamb.bsky.social · 2d

This is complete and utter pompous bullshit. It's telling that of the people proposing it wants to anoint themselves director general when every one of his claims of having discovered technosignature interstellar objects has been debunked by the planetary community. arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01405

arxiv.org

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Jason Wright @astrowright.bsky.social · 4d

harpers.org/archive/1941...

Who Goes Nazi?, by Dorothy Thompson

harpers.org

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Jason Wright @astrowright.bsky.social · 6d

I feel like AI is also improving?

Jason Wright @astrowright.bsky.social · 6d

The “overconfident and overeager kiss-up intern” model short circuits this in my mind. I am always willing to be impressed at its capabilities and what a great job it’s done, but I also understand that, without checking, I can’t tell the pure bullshit from the mistakes from the good work.

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Jason Wright @astrowright.bsky.social · 6d

Fundamentally, our brains are wired to impute certain reasoning, motivations, and an inner mind to someone using confident (and flattering) language. This creates a huge failure mode in our interactions, exploited by conmen and causing us to overinterpret AI language models.

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Jason Wright @astrowright.bsky.social · 6d

AI has gotten much better at a lot of things, but my mental model that it should only be used for tasks you would give an overeager and overconfident intern remains pretty solid.

I am often impressed by the work it does, but you have to double check everything yourself if it needs to be right.

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Jason Wright @astrowright.bsky.social · 8d

I don’t know, but I will point out that there are very strong observational biases at play that make it very hard to figure out the size distribution of interstellar objects, even ignoring the fact that we only have three of them so far. LSST will help a lot.

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Jason Wright @astrowright.bsky.social · 8d

I don't think planetary scientists are confused or puzzled by the size distribution of bound comets that reach the inner solar system.

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Jason Wright @astrowright.bsky.social · 8d

His calculation is *very* rough and naive. It is only barely consistent with the HST data. It might be right but it needs to be checked more carefully.

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Jason Wright @astrowright.bsky.social · 8d

It's only the 3rd such object we've seen so it's unclear what the statistics should be.

And 5 km is an *upper limit*. It could easily be smaller than that.

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Jason Wright @astrowright.bsky.social · 8d

3I/ATLAS is already getting an appropriately extraordinary amount of attention from professional observatories. I don’t think there’s any reason to think their small cameras have anything useful to contribute to the likes of JWST, LSST, and SphereX.

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