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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 1d

Maybe it's just age or experience, but my jaundiced eye is firmly expecting an eventual loss of some ADS functionality or other due to resource competition with the upkeep of SciX.

Signed, user who didn't necessarily find new improved ADS interface at all an improvement for humans.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 2d

Really ticked me off when the place where we get most of our staples rearranged everything in fall of 2020. Because nothing says "we'll help you get in and out fast to stay healthy" quite like randomly shuffling everything you knew how to find.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 2d

The same preprint server which quietly declined to post our RNAAS note in which we find actually existing color-selected things in early Rubin data. Got it.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 5d

Well, they do seem farther apart since the Louisville and Nashville Railroad was finally dissolved a few years after I left VU. (Sitting here wearing black and gold and hoping to giggle riotously watching tomorrow's game after seeing 4 full years of terrible football in the band 50 YEARS AGO now)

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 7d

From collaborator email this morning: "I have deconvolution code and am not afraid to use it (even when maybe I should be)." (Does it even matter whether HST or JWST is the context?)

Reposted by Bill Keel

Arp Bot 🤖 @arpbot.bsky.social · 8d

Hubble image of Arp 297, also known as NGC 5754 and NGC 5752.

The pair's interactions created kinked arms in NGC 5754 (the large spiral galaxy) and the blue star clusters in the core of NGC 5752 (the smaller galaxy).

Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage team, W. Keel
Source

A pair of galaxies, a large face-on barred spiral galaxy and a smaller edge-on disk galaxy. The upper portion of the frame is dominated by the spiral galaxy NGC 5754. It has a bright, pale yellow, circular core that transitions into an almost vertical bar structure. Two well-defined spiral arms circle around the core counter-clockwise, beginning at the ends of the bar. The arms both complete one revolution around the core and then fade out. They are dotted with pale blue star clusters. At about 5 and 7 o'clock on the bottom of the galaxy, the spiral arms have small kinks, creating what looks like straight segments in the otherwise smoothly curving arms. Overall, the galaxy looks a little like a cinnamon roll. In the bottom left corner of the frame is the smaller companion galaxy NGC 5752. It is oval-shaped, with the long axis almost vertical, running parallel to the bar of the large spiral. On a background of pale yellow stars is a line of blue dots, which are star clusters, running through the long axis in the center of the galaxy. Below this is a dark brown dust lane.

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Reposted by Bill Keel

Kym @ The Evening Sky Map @skymaps.com · 10d

🌟 The October 2025 edition of The Evening Sky Map is ready for download at skymaps.com/tesm/. The PDF features a Sky Calendar and easy-to-use sky maps for the northern and southern hemispheres, as well as equatorial regions. Please share, and enjoy exploring the Universe! 🔭
#stargazing

The Evening Sky Map is a 2-page monthly publication that features an all-sky map of the night sky, a calendar of celestial events, and a list of celestial objects visible to the naked eye, binoculars and telescopes.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 9d

Today in "everything is connected if you pull hard enough".

Marcus Chown @marcuschown.bsky.social · 10d

Gustav Holst was the school music teacher of Cecilia Payne, who discovered the chemical composition of the stars. He tried to get her to become a musician but she ignored him. She went on to write the most important astrophysics PhD of the 20th century and become the first woman professor at Harvard

New Leibniz @newleibniz.bsky.social · 17d

#classicalmusic #opera When I see "Gustav Holst" I can't help but wishing that he had stopped writing "The Planets" long before he got to Neptune. 🤮

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 11d

Could be considered settled or pushed by the 11th Circuit in 1991 from Bishop v. Aronov, which held that a university has absolute control over what is done in the classroom. (Coulda been but was not argued as a religious-freedom issue, instead basically IP) firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/bish...

Bishop v. Aronov (11th Circuit Court) (1991)

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the University of Alabama's actions to stop a professor from interjecting religious views in a physiology class in Bishop v. Aronov.

firstamendment.mtsu.edu

Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 12d

Me in journal club today after a student reviewed a bunch of papers on LRDs: "They can't use the same photons for direct UV and IR heating - that would be Enron accou- (looks at ages of grad students) - double counting."

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 12d

Y'know, I remember when any version of "black holes grew first" was so silly as not to be worth discussing. Then high-z mass estimates started coming in... (and the meaning of "high" kept receding into the reionization fog).

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 13d

Won't name and shame, but an interesting abstract in #arxiv was just posted using multiple "private" macros for phrases, many pointless math mode tags, and part of the text which was behind a %. Colleagues, think of your readers! (Not much of a pet peeve these days, but if your aim is readership...)

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 16d

There is a rich and sad history of people "explaining" why we all interpreted that wrong and They Know The Date. (Far from me to speculate whether they actually believe these rationalizations.)

Signed, guy known in church groups for saying "I'd like to represent a responsible opposing viewpoint".

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 16d

As my advisor said (to someone else), never do anything well that you don't want to do again. Just saying. Muzzle that blasted sense of responsibility.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 18d

I am making desperate plans to survive a dispute between research assistants.

Black cat sitting on keyboard giving dirty look to extremely fluffy sealpoint cat sitting on my arm, as I contemplate how to bandage my inevitable injuries.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 19d

I dunno, man, the geese remember. Do not mess with them.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 21d

Extragalactic astronomer here, one of the handful of people who regularly need to type "spectrophotometry" and never get it right on the first try. (Stares back at that line yet again to be sure). Extremely niche.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 24d

Until you get a solution on that, and on the off chance you don't have some already, my about-to-be-68 post-knee-surgery self was amazed at what a wonderful invention litter scoops with 12-inch handles are. We keep one by each of the 4 receptacles.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 27d

Ooooohhh. It is.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 29d

In comparison, my blanking on even my spotty Dutch and googling "Keel Voorwerp" to check the reach of a press release was positively benign. (The phrase means "throat obstruction"). OTOH trying to find any images from Venus missions for classes got continually trickier.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 29d

Exorcism?

Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · Sep 5

My father the newspaper writer will be haunting me for that slip.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · Sep 4

My annual musing that my grad advisor built a spectropolarimeter for the Shane telescope with two of the largest natural calcite blocks ever found - and managed to pay a Mexican prospector for them from grant funds. They each had names (which I have, alas, forgotten).

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · Sep 3

Yeah, it's not his most lucid prose, but then again, he was noted for contemplating darkness.

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Reposted by Bill Keel

Kym @ The Evening Sky Map @skymaps.com · Aug 29

🌟 The September 2025 edition of The Evening Sky Map is ready for download at skymaps.com/tesm/. The PDF features a Sky Calendar and easy-to-use sky maps for the northern and southern hemispheres, as well as the equatorial regions. Feel free to share, and enjoy exploring the Universe! 🔭
#stargazing

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