Dr. Cindy

Fun fact: people googling ‘Solar Flare’ is a great measure of the Sun’s 11-year solar cycle!

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

🧪🔭☄️👩‍🔬

My first science video in 3 years! YouTube video by Physics Girl

Ahhhh, this video is so great! ☀️ particles going through the Earth! (And I’m excited to see @thephysicsgirl.bsky.social talking about this!)

youtu.be/B3m3AMRlYfc?...

How to Eat like Nikola Tesla

Are we alone in the universe? Five times we thought we found extraterrestrial life Though scientists failed to confirm the presence of extraterrestrial life in these instances, these misconceptions provide valuable lessons for future searches.

How have we failed to find aliens so far, and what have we learned from our mistakes?

Words by my @carnegiescience.bsky.social intern Em Dobberfuhl for @sequencermag.bsky.social!

Ida Tacke Noddack, seen in profile, wearing a white lab coat with her hair up. She is focused on and apparatus that she is handling. It consists of a white tube, about a foot long, with metal caps and a rubber line connected to one end.

Chemist and physicist Ida Tacke Noddack was born #OTD in 1896. She was co-discoverer of the element Rhenium in 1925, and in 1934 she suggested that the results of an experiment by Fermi might be explained by nuclear fission. (1/n) 🧪 ⚛️ 👩‍🔬

Image: KU Leuven University Archives

James Webb Telescope Takes a First Peek Inside Uranus The planet's upper atmosphere has been mapped for the first time, revealing one of the solar system's most enigmatic members.

That headline! 👩‍🍳😘 🔭
www.extremetech.com/science/jame...

Time for a waffle party!

Orion looking pretty tonight sitting majestically over Glastonbury Tor. A reminder that there is so much beauty and power in the world around us. Moon sitting top right so it's not me on a ladder with a spotlight. 😂

Uranus seen in infrared with JWST's NIRSpec instrument. The blobs around the polar cap are aurorae. The planet's ring system is clearly visible, almost directly face on.

New pic of Uranus just dropped

☄️

Had some clear skies this past week so got about 2 hours on M81 with the Quattro 250p, Starizona Nexus reducer/corrector and QHY Minicam8 585m.

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky Synopsis. Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For

Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes!

"Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."

A large radio antenna dish at night, illuminated by spotlights and pointed up at a starry sky. Photo: Bill Dunford

Ink drawing of a large radio antenna dish pointed upward at a blue sky rendered in watercolor, along with hand-written notes about the antenna and its function, and a poem about the Goldstone station of NASA's Deep Space Network. Art and text: Bill Dunford

The giant 70-meter antenna at NASA's Deep Space Communication Complex at Goldstone, California.

Single-exposure photograph, September 2025
Ink and watercolor, April 2018

www.nasa.gov/communicating-with-missions/dsn/

Comic. [Over dark background, a five-pointed pentagram-style star orbits around a white circle with a smaller orbit.] [caption] Space news: Astronomers have found the first known system with a main-sequence star orbited by a five-pointed one.

Binary Star

xkcd.com/3203/

Text mode base Full Moon drawn with black and white semigraphic characters. Moon is on the center of the picture surrounded by a starry sky. A shooting start is passing by on the left.

Full Moon

#textmode #1bit #pixelart

Astronomer Paris Pişmiş was born 115 years ago today. Born in Turkey, she spent most of her career in Mexico where she was a central figure in building up the Mexican astronomy program, serving for a half century at UNAM and establishing the Tonantzintla Observatory.

#WomenInSTEM #AstroSky 🧪🔭

The planetary nebula Abell 7 via APOD ✨ It's ~1800 light-years away & ~8 light-years wide. A planetary nebula is a brief final phase in a "normal" star's life - our own Sun will go through this in ~5 billion years as it sheds its outer layers. 📸: Martin Pugh apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap26012...

'Eye of God' nebula looks like a cosmic lava lamp in new James Webb Space Telescope image It may be one of the most iconic sights in the night sky, but astronomers have never seen the Helix Nebula like this before.

Keep zooming in on these images 🤯 🔭

www.space.com/astronomy/ga...

Wow, we are nearing S4 / SEVERE radiation storm levels before predicted impact of the CME. This is getting intense! It has been over 22 years since we have reached these levels of proton flux enhancement. Quite impressive.

Q&A: Patricia Vader pivoted from astronomy to sculpture She uses the same approach to problem-solving in her art as she did in her science.

For Patricia Vader, staying in astronomy research for the remaining decades of her career was unappealing. So, after a successful and satisfying run in science, she became a sculptor. #physics #art

Did Asteroids Collide Near Fomalhaut – Again? The young, nearby star Fomalhaut may be experiencing an episode of repeated, violent collisions within its forming planetary system.

Sky & Telescope has a great in-depth article on the new Fomalhaut collisional object, with some quotes from yours truly.

skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-ne...

My linocut portrait of Hypatia in purple holding an astrolabe up to her eye with her left arm while her right rests on geometric diagrams on sheets of paper on her table. Astrolabe and table plus diagrams are bronze in colour. I’ve shown her with curly hair piled up on her head, in a loose tunic with sash. Behind her are two Doric columns and arch.

Another unknown birthday: Amongst the earliest recorded woman in #mathematics, Hypatia lived during the 3rd century AD in Alexandria, Egypt, which was part of the Roman Empire. 🧪🐡👩🏼‍🔬🧮 🔭 #histsci She was born at some time between about 350 & 370 & died in 415 C.E. She taught philosophy, #astronomy & 🧵

Historic Lick Observatory damaged by 114 mph winds The Lick Observatory is shut down after a severe holiday windstorm significantly damaged the historic building on Mount Hamilton.

Yikes!
www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/l...

A large gingerbread structure of Rubin Observatory. It's nestled in a frosted, gingerbread-dusted hill and the tiny gleam of a mirror peaks out from inside the dome.

This year's gingerbread is the Vera Rubin Observatory! @vrubinobs.bsky.social

"A Galaxy stone"
Goniatite fossils spiraling through space in this worn down sedimentary shore stone.
These are the fossilized shells left on the sea floor that covered this place over 300 million years ago.
County Clare, Ireland.

Oae up of a yarn oval with concentric orange and black rings hung on a pine tree

I crocheted an HL Tau ornament (ALMA's version) for the institute Christmas tree! 🔭

A colorful berry pie. The crust is painted to look like Kitt Peak National Observatory, scattered with small white telescopes and framed by colorful pie-crust stars.

Happy Thanksgiving :)
@desisurvey.bsky.social

Sky viewing tool with Euclid's Dark Cloud in the infrared on top of a ground-based visible image.

We followed up #ESAEuclid's near-infrared image of the Dark Cloud LDN 1641 with a comparison to the NIR 2MASS survey, and to a bespoke ground-based image in visible light.

Here's the comparison including a tool to experiment yourself:

www.euclid-ec.org/clouds-darkn...

#ESA #space #science 🔭

Webb First to Show 4 Dust Shells 'Spiraling' Apep, Limits Long Orbit - NASA Science NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has delivered a first of its kind: a crisp mid-infrared image of a system of four serpentine spirals of dust, one expanding

Very excited to share the NASA/ESA/STScI press release of our team's work on Apep! It's a terrific writeup, complete with a brand new beautiful visualisation of the nebula geometry.
1/? ⚛️🔭🧪
science.nasa.gov/missions/web...