I'm going to expand this statement to say that astronomers should actually look at their data whatever the format. Yes pipelines and high level science products are great, but you learn a lot from just spending some time exploring the counts-on-pixels images, even for spectroscopy. 🔭
Cover of "Picture an Astronomer: Best Practices for Retaining Talent in Astrophysics", which features an illustration of a 19-year-old Vera Rubin looking through a telescope over a backdrop of a first light image of spiral galaxies from the Rubin Observatory.
Happy International Women's Day!
Perfect time for me to (re)share our white paper on increasing the retention of women in professional astrophysics (really full of suggestions that broaden participation in academic science in general).
arxiv.org/abs/2512.24465
🧪🔭☄️👩🔬
After a week in Aspen, it only snowed on the last day, AND in that short time I still managed to get the car stuck in the mud and snow.
An image from part of the GOODS-South portion of the FUEL Survey showing random pointings of scattered around the area and a mosaic of pointings covering the UltraDerp Field.
Introducing the Far-Ultraviolet Extragalactic Legacy (FUEL) survey! We uniformly reduced and aligned all Hubble far-UV imaging in the extragalactic legacy fields. Shout out to my student Aliakbar Kavei for the great work completing this project. Check it out! 🔭
arxiv.org/abs/2603.04511
Wow! Looks great!
Happy to share Neloura, a web based platform for interactive astronomical image analysis, available publicly and runnable on the CANFAR Science portal! Built for coding, visualization, interaction, and cataloging workflows.
neloura.com
🛰 www.canfar.net/science-port...
📦 github.com/hamidnpc/Nel...
How it started (maybe let's call these things Little Red Dots???) // How it's going (xkcd #3212) 🔭🧪
Winter Olympics side effect: I’m now commuting to campus on inline skates.
As promised yesterday: a new alternative model for Little Red Dots. Maybe they're not stars powered by black hole accretion ... maybe they're globular clusters in formation! That's the suggestion in a new paper led by John Chisholm, anyway. It sounds impossible, but hear me out: 🧪🔭☄️
I already reposted this earlier, but wanted to highlight the contributions of our @stsci.edu postdoc Pierluigi Rinaldi who is going hard after these LRDs & doing awesome work. His paper on Virgil is based in-part on our MIRI deep imaging survey, MIDIS, find it here: scixplorer.org/abs/2025ApJ.... 🔭
From Niloofar Sharei @astroneal.bsky.social : Something is missing in the middle. In JWST JADES galaxies, young clumps drop out in the inner regions, while clump structure shifts from the outskirts to the center. ⚛️ 🔭 ☄️ 🧪
astrobites.org/2026/02/11/s...
David Hogg has written a white paper on doing astrophysics in the age of LLMs. It looks to be thought-provoking. My initial reaction is that either LLMs will destroy the field or they will force a reckoning with and re-imagining of the current system that often prioritizes output over quality. 🧪
I almost thought this was a cosmic web simulation! Look at those filaments and voids! 🔭
This is what the most distant confirmed galaxy looks like. The light we're receiving was emitted when the Universe was ~15x smaller in linear size than today, and right now it's ~30 billion light-years away from us. The light was emitted when the Universe was <300 million years old. Pretty amazing!
Our AAS Education Committee report on 'The Landscape of Undergraduate Astronomy and Astrophysics Degree Requirements' is now available on arXiv: www.arxiv.org/abs/2602.03959. Please give it a read!
On the #arXiv today: first 2 papers from the PRISMS program (PRImordial galaxy Survey with MIRI Spectroscopy), a 130-hr program using the #JWST MIRI Low-Res Spectrometer to get 5-14 µm spectroscopy of galaxies at z~10. arxiv.org/abs/2602.02323 & arxiv.org/abs/2602.02322 🔭
Paper day!! Little Red Dots (LRDs) are seen everywhere by JWST, but even after 3 years of relentless effort we are still debating what these things actually are. We decompose LRDs to show LRD - Host Galaxy = Black Hole Star (BH*)! 🧵
arxiv.org/abs/2601.20929
🔭 🧪
The JWST Cycle 6 deadline will be September 30th. I don't think past JWST proposal deadlines have coincided with ground-based telescope deadlines.
I have expressed my concerns to the JWST User's Committee Chair and I encourage you to do the same. #astronomy 🔭
www.stsci.edu/jwst/science...
IMF-related tensions are my favorite!They’re always interesting.
From Niloofar Sharei @astroneal.bsky.social : Are cosmic clumps “homegrown”, or fueled by fresh inflow? Today’s authors find that star-forming clumps are usually more metal-poor than the disks around them. ⚛️ 🔭 ☄️ 🧪
astrobites.org/2026/01/27/f...
a substantial fraction of my adult life has now been spent watching the worst of the worst reshaping our world. This cannot go on
#IranMassacre :
Don't stop talking about Iran.
Don't stop talking about Iran.
Don't stop talking about Iran.
Don't stop talking about Iran.
Don't stop talking about Iran.
Don't stop talking about Iran.
#DigitalBlackoutIran
President Zelensky at Davos: “What will Iran become after this bloodshed? If the regime survives, it sends a clear signal to every bully: kill enough people and you stay in power.”
#Iran #IranMassacre
Adulthood: just needing someone to confirm you’re not crazy.
From Lucie Rowland: What if some of JWST’s most extreme high-redshift galaxy candidates aren’t galaxies at all, but the explosive deaths of the very first stars? ⚛️🔭☄🧪
astrobites.org/2026/01/16/t...
This is not a sudden uprising.
It is the result of decades of repression and resistance. Be a voice for a free Iran!
Artwork by @romina.zabihian
#IranProtests
In not-very-good news, extreme winds (114 mph gusts) on the early morning of the 25th caused significant damage to the 36" Great Refractor at Lick Observatory. Half of the main shutter broke off and landed on the main building.
I could make a list of all the different ways people have pronounced my name :))
Everyone should learn how to pronounce other people's names correctly as a basic rule to live by, but also - do it out of care! Isn't it cool to learn someone else's name, and to be given permission to use it? Don't you care enough about them to get it right?
Near-holidays activity: reorganizing my Slack channels by favorites (like it really matters!)
