Michael Aye

The Planetary Factsheets revival from NASA's NSSDC have been further improved by adding constants that my initial website parsing missed, e.g. J2 and many more. I also added a special RangeConstant datatype to acknowledge when a parameter doesn't have a single value on the factsheet. Released...

Keep asking questions!

@elsevierconnect.bsky.social The editorialmanager.com website currently sends out the "Review for Icarus - Next steps" email twice. With just very tiny font detail differences. Quite perplexing.

JPL Horizons is down. Every planetary astronomers worst fear. I hope it comes back up soon (and thanks JPL for the awesome service you do for the community)

Officially reached the age where I need to tell my parents to not watch so much TV. :)

Update your conda and pip, folks!

And if you use pip environments (uv, pyenv, conda), you need to *update pip in each environment*, which is a total pain (I asked an agent to do it for me)

Fuck it. It's time. Build the Blackwall.

Where is the biggest snicker to hear these days? IN THE DJANGO CONMUNITY! :)

"If I were racist, my hands would only be bloody from helping to kill Africans and Asians. Since I'm also willing to kill Ukrainian civilians, I'm clearly not racist. Checkmate, libs."

*goes to update lecture notes* (Seriously this is WILD.)

I'm not sure how much more blatant it can get that these guys are looting the federal government and then pointing over there and saying "look what THOSE BLACK PEOPLE ARE GETTING AWAY WITH!!!" bsky.app/profile/atru...

He just might make me fly United again... ;)

Russia is now exempt from the Lindsey O. Graham Russia Sanctions Act. The US government is clearly allied with Putin against Ukraine. Vote Republican enablers out.

Python 3.15 has landed on conda-forge, everybody! Enjoy your weekend! :)

THREE WEEKS FROM TODAY IS THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE MOST CORRUPT ADMINISTRATION IN U.S. HISTORY. IF WE ALL VOTE. 🗳️ #AccountabilityIsComing11/3/26

Another tip for creating science projects with Claude: always recheck the tests that Claude is generating. They are very often vacuous tautology tests or sometimes worse and not even calling the function to be tested.

With news about the transition from ADS to SciX trending today, here's a little SciX superuser hot tip. You can make SciX one of the search engine options in your browser, which then makes it easy to initiate a literature search from your navigation bar. scixplorer.org

I'm a grown up physicist, and have easily derived the answer myself. Problem is, I JUST CANNOT BELIEVE IT! :) Don't want to! Total physics gut failure, I'm sad... youtube.com/shorts/Sip04...

More material for a sequel to the popular movie series "Only in US..." ;)

if people whose job is to create and work with legal documents would just do their fucking jobs and create documents that are applicable and make sense, that would just be awesome.

The petition Change the way ESA hires and contracts. is important to me! ✍️ Please also sign: openpetition.eu/zldlf

Pidgeon Chess!

For the second fiscal year in a row, NASA awarded ~20% fewer grants than the recent historical average. That's about 500 fewer grants going out to scientists around the country.

for creating good matplotlib plots, AI/Claude REALLY shines. the amount of fine-tuning I am able to do without looking up the 20 year old APIs that sometimes (not always) are counter-intuitive or just "aged"... it's cool how good looking products one can achieve in less time!

vibe coding challenge: press "1: Accept and use auto mode" when the beat drops of the background deep house music. It's fun! ;)

LLM asked me to say "Go" to start the simulation. I typed "Engage" and I smiled. ;)

One thing that becomes clear to me trying to do science with an LLM: you absolutely have to force it to produce library code with tests and reuse it from the beginning! When you allow to create quick scripts there’s no guarantee that the physics are implemented the same way in the next script.

i'm not over Alito saying we shouldn't count ballots that are mailed on or before Election Day but arrive shortly afterwards bc they can “radically flip” the “apparent outcome” cannot stress enough that, until all ballots are counted, there's no outcome to flip! ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/alito...

Huge turnout at the Kennedy Center tonight! 💚✊ Thank you!

As I said to a friend a couple of years ago: “AI isn’t going to kill us with fucking Terminator robots, it’s going to kill us by rendering a modern, computer-based society incapable of functioning!”

One of most annoying things I find since being back in Germany is being pressured to pay for a toilet visit in a shopping mall. The mall wants my money, it can make my visit comfortable by sorting this out themselves.

Music lovers: there are 2 versions of Shirley Bassey’s Goldfinger out there. On the soundtrack she moves more steady to the beat, which I find supports the heavy accompany well. But there’s also another radio or studio version where she keeps slowing down and accelerating, not liking it. What u say?

Flight attendants have the right to organize a union without intimidation or interference. I've received reports that Delta threatened pay and benefits, and encouraged new workers to report colleagues for even mentioning a union. I'm pushing back against union-busting tactics.

This is one of the best scientific programming resources on the web having its latest release. I learned so much from this free resource over the years!

Canada is worth fighting for. Today. Tomorrow. Forever.

I have released 0.12.0 of my isistools that contained a bug fixed version of csm2map, a faster, pure python version of cam2map. Its faster because it tries to do all in RAM, that works up to CTX size with laptop memory, for HiRISE I’m still testing how it can do it partially out of memory.

Guten Morgen zusammen - wie gewohnt mit einem aktuellen Bild der Sonne per Satellit SDO.

Oh my word I think yoga instructions that often say don’t shrug possibly created too weak shrug muscles for me creating in turn rotator cuff issues. There I was thinking shrugging is never good and this seems to be wrong!?!

PROJ ships planetary CRS under a versioned authority, IAU_2015. Write one to a GeoTIFF or GeoPackage, read it back, and most of the stack can't tell you what it is any more. Four round-trips, minimal reproducers. One works. michaelaye.github.io/posts/iau-cr...

The remaining spacecraft is also "power-positive", with the solar panels were stored since end of cruise in June and they have now successfully been switched back on.

📡 Estrack deep space antennas are in position for #BepiColombo. Cebreros ready for separation detection - check! ☑️ Malargüe ready for background tracking - check! ☑️ @esa.int #JAXA #Mercury