Bruce Macintosh

@theplanetaryguy.com this should be Phase II of our plan to improve ground-based astronomy. Without the moon, we would have nearly twice as much time available for faint-object visible-light astronomy[1].

[1] You might technically argue that when Phase I removes the Earth's atmosphere, then scattered light from the full moon will be less of an issue. I do not intend to listen to those arguments and I am sure there will be other benefits anyway[2].

Nice historical note: this is the 30th anniversary of the first time astronomers reached the diffraction limit with a sodium laser guide star. www.ucobservatories.org/pioneering-t...

In the

Nice historical note: this is the 30th anniversary of the first time astronomers reached the diffraction limit with a sodium laser guide star. www.ucobservatories.org/pioneering-t...

Making it all work at Lick Observatory taught us a huge amount about how to do science with laser guide star AO. That paid off immensely when Keck got their LGS; from almost day 1 it did science, and (as we all know) made amazing discoveries.

Nice historical note: this is the 30th anniversary of the first time astronomers reached the diffraction limit with a sodium laser guide star. www.ucobservatories.org/pioneering-t...

It turned out the laser was tuned to an argon line (long story) at 588 nm; so we retuned and then saw light the next night, which was amazing. One other problem: after that, it took about a year to reach the point where turning AO system on didn't actively make images worse.

Nice historical note: this is the 30th anniversary of the first time astronomers reached the diffraction limit with a sodium laser guide star. www.ucobservatories.org/pioneering-t...

The first time we fired the laser, the beam went up...but no fluorescence and no guide star light back down. After a night of head scratching, people wanted to check the laser spectrum.

Nice historical note: this is the 30th anniversary of the first time astronomers reached the diffraction limit with a sodium laser guide star. www.ucobservatories.org/pioneering-t...

The laser is tuned to the 589 nm sodium transition. It turns out there's a layer of sodium atoms 90-100 km above the earth; these fluoresce, making an artificial guide star wherever you want it. That serves as a reference to measure atmospheric turbulence and let you sharpen images to space-quality

This graph represents probably more than a hundred thousand hours of work by our community. Every year when I look at it I think our current proposal model is broken.

So much work making proposals. So much work reviewing proposals as if we could meaningfully distinguish between the 9th and 11th percentile. And then next year so many brilliant people who are going to be disappointed.

Of all the big franchises, Star Trek remains by far my favorite - formative exposure as a 6-year-old to just having watched TWOK on the big screen with my kid. Optimistic, with a belief that the future really can be better, and that good people can solve problems with science and diplomacy.

Remember the whole “science is getting too safe and boring (and less disruptive)?” Turns out to be mostly a database artifact, shown in this brilliant thread.

bsky.app/profile/vinc...

Remember the whole “science is getting too safe and boring (and less disruptive)?” Turns out to be mostly a database artifact, shown in this brilliant thread.

bsky.app/profile/vinc...

Remember the whole “science is getting too safe and boring (and less disruptive)?” Turns out to be mostly a database artifact, shown in this brilliant thread.

Thread is chopped up on blue sky for me, here’s part 2 bsky.app/profile/vinc...

I was at Lawrence Livermore National Lab twenty years ago when the Bush administration did something similar to University of California and the NNSA national labs (LLNL and Los Alamos) the outcome wasn't a disaster but it wasn't great.

Research collaborations between the labs and UC got a lot harder too, with new taxes and layers of complexity (contracts instead of fund transfers, etc.) There are still collaborations but there's a lot of friction.

I was at Lawrence Livermore National Lab twenty years ago when the Bush administration did something similar to University of California and the NNSA national labs (LLNL and Los Alamos) the outcome wasn't a disaster but it wasn't great.

In the old days UC invested the (tiny) overhead fee they got into R&D. But to encourage bidders, the contracts had to allow for profits by the corporations, so suddenly costs to outside research sponsors or NNSA went up by several percent, affecting every research project.

I was at Lawrence Livermore National Lab twenty years ago when the Bush administration did something similar to University of California and the NNSA national labs (LLNL and Los Alamos) the outcome wasn't a disaster but it wasn't great.

The call didn't actually let universities bid directly - only corporations could bid (!). So UC had to create standalone UC-owned corporations to compete and include corporate partners like Bechtel. And in the end there weren't a lot of other bidders.

I was at Lawrence Livermore National Lab twenty years ago when the Bush administration did something similar to University of California and the NNSA national labs (LLNL and Los Alamos) the outcome wasn't a disaster but it wasn't great.

In the old days UC ran these labs as a national service, and to advance science in ways that benefitted both - LLNL developed the first astronomical adaptive optics system at @lickobservatory.bsky.social and @keckobservatory.bsky.social , lots of students got great PhDs.

It’s also an effect of running against impossible policies without a media system that points this out. If Trump says “we will raise tariffs and this will lower your gas prices by 400%“ it’s hard to sound better with proposals for EITC changes. Nothing real can compete with “magic ponies for all”