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The older telescope still has its objective lens, but a replacement eyepiece: catalogue.museogalileo.it/object/Galil... The other still has both: catalogue.museogalileo.it/object/Galil... And in the same display case: catalogue.museogalileo.it/object/Galil...

La Specola museum - housed in the old university observatory - has an excellent geology gallery. The specimens are amazing, very well displayed, and include a comprehensive collection of different meteorite types. 🔭🧪 The natural history collection there is also very impressive.

These are not just Galilean-style telescopes, they are the originals: hand-built by Galileo himself in 1609 and 1610, the only surviving examples. The older of the two is possibly the telescope he used to discover the moons of Jupiter - which revolutionised astronomy. 🔭🧪⚛️ #astrohistory #planetsci

This paper has now been published in final journal format, including the authors' one-page summary of their results, and my one-paragraph summary. Pick your preferred level of detail! ☄️🔭🧪 #exoplanets www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Check the licence of the image - if it’s CC-BY or public domain (no copyright), a credit line in the caption is all that’s required. Any more restrictive licence (or no licence specified) will need written permission from the copyright holder, which they might charge for.

I'll add that several important papers on this topic were published in Science: - Kelly+ 2015 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... - Goobar+ 2017 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... - Jee+ 2019 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... - Kelly+ 2023 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Even outside the lab 🤷‍♂️ I used to have a snazzy blue lab coat for teaching undergraduate laboratory sessions. It never occurred to me to take it on an observing run.

New story with details about the ‘SR-1 Freedom’ nuclear propulsion mission to Mars. How would it work, and where did the idea come from? Is there any chance of meeting the timeline? 🧪🔭⚛️🛰️ #planetsci www.science.org/content/arti...

History and mystery surround NASA’s 2028 nuclear Mars missionFission-powered space flight, a 60-year dream, would supercharge outer Solar System explorationwww.science.org

Insightful stuff. Tools for doing-without-understanding aren't new, but AI makes the problem more pervasive. I'd draw analogies with running a data reduction pipeline but never looking at the FITS files, or applying a statistical test without knowing what it's really measuring etc.

Artemis II is a flyby, not a landing

The Dec 2028 timeline for an entirely new mission, using untried technology, seems completely implausible. It appears to be driven by the end of Trump's presidential term, not science or engineering. 🧪🔭🛰️ #planetsci The quotes in the NASA press release are eye opening. www.nasa.gov/news-release...

NASA Unveils Initiatives to Achieve America’s National Space Policy - NASAAs part of its “Ignition” event on Tuesday, NASA announced a series of transformative agencywide initiatives designed to achieve President Donald J. Trump’swww.nasa.gov

Yes, anyone who pays the registration fee can attend - no PhD required. For the Jan 2026 AAS meeting, the 'non-member' fee was *prohibitively* expensive. However @astropotamus.com might qualify for 'amateur affiliate' or 'educator' membership, saving ~$1000. aas.org/meetings/aas...

Here’s the article. Funny how she took up both roles in 2025, but didn’t think there was a conflict of interest until 2026… physicsworld.com/a/michele-do...

Michele Dougherty steps aside as president of the Institute of Physics – Physics WorldIOP president-elect Paul Howarth will take on Dougherty’s responsibilities with immediate effectphysicsworld.com

Apparently Dougherty has ‘stepped back’ from that role. Almost like it was a bad idea allowing one person to wear so many hats in the first place…

Me too, and it repeatedly refused to believe that I was human. Maybe I’m just terrible at recognising what is or isn’t a hat…

You don’t need to be a member of AAS to attend their meetings.

This paper has now been published in final journal format, and is featured on the cover of this week's print issue. ☄️🔭 #extragalactic www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

(I have no idea what you mean by "LLM dualism".)

It wouldn't be, if limited to keywords alone and carefully implemented. It might even be useful. LLM-enabled 'retrieval tools' for ADS appeared relevant to Johanna's comments about using AI bots to interrogate bibliographic databases. I'll let her decide whether she's concerned by that statement.

You might be concerned by recent ADS announcements then: "development of language models capable of automatically assigning scientific concepts (keywords) to research papers. Such models will enable future information-retrieval tools for astrophysics." ☄️🔭 ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/help/whats_n...