Drone show over Boston Harbor for the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride. I’m sure just as he’d have expected.

(It was an iteration of the New England Flag I saw recently.) www.nps.gov/articles/000...

Typing the same prompt into Google Image search gets a much faster (and correct) menu of answers.

LLMs continue to disappoint me. Have a look at this swing and a miss from what should be in a LLM wheelhouse.

I just got proofs back from ApJ and I'm deeply disturbed by how a copy editor thought this was a valid correction. Am I crazy? Is there ever a valid reason to use "consensual" in this way? What is a "consensual picture"?!

Kinda reminds me of V1309 Scorpi, the contact binary that merged -- got a bit brighter before a dip and then merger. Gaia25abj looks like an x-ray source with an APOGEE spectrum showing tons of emission...

Turns out all our McDonald data came in a long period of quiescence that finally ended in 2024! Our paper today reveals the persistence we needed to find transits around SBSS 1232+563, demonstrating that white dwarf debris can be very sporadic! arxiv.org/abs/2501.02050

Unfortunately we just couldn't confirm it to have transits from rocky debris. We watched for nearly 40 hr from McDonald Observatory and saw nothing too exciting. Eventually we noted it as a strong candidate (ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021ApJ....), but weren't too convinced.

Here's a fun backstory to a paper too many years in the making: "Sporadic Dips from Extended Debris Transiting the Metal-Rich White Dwarf SBSS 1232+563" (arxiv.org/abs/2501.02050) which just hit the arxiv.