Bill Keel

There will be a 3-plane flyover by NASA jets (one flown by the administrator) before this Saturday's Alabama homecoming football game against Texas A&M. Am I the only one bemused by the press release calling these F-5s rather than T-38s, or are there somehow new planes? www.nasa.gov/news-release...

No notes.

Work must be right - and that means extreme care needs to be taken to make sure we are not wrong. If we are right, then we should be interesting! Otherwise what's the point? If we're doing something right and interesting, then there is space to be creative. Is the method novel? Is it fun?

Phone rang at 0452 local time on Sunday morning. Too groggy to see the phone said "spam risk", I picked up and it purported to tell me of a problem with a FedEx delivery address. Even for a legitimate delivery call that seems like an unlikely call time. Life's better with, umm, something or other...

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...

Lemme see whether tagging @dragoncon.org will get this on the Con feed. One might think I'd long ago figured out doing BlueSky feeds, but one would be wrong. #dragoncon

In case you missed it at the Con - a processed collection of images we took in front of an audience (sometimes based on requests) at this year's Live Astronomy in Space Track. The remotely-operated telescopes are at observatories in Chile and the Canary Islands. Check us out in 2027! #dragoncon

💫 The October 2026 edition of The Evening Sky Map (PDF) is available for download at skymaps.com/tesm/. It features easy-to-use sky maps for the northern & southern hemispheres, and equatorial regions. Enjoy exploring the night sky! 🔭 #stargazing #space #nightsky

Built a thing that #aatrosky may enjoy: galaxy-manifold.github.io

I'm excited to announce the official launch of Overlap Zoo, a citizen science project supported by @nasa and in collaboration with the @galaxyzoo.org team. Please help us classify and categorize these amazing cosmic coincidences! www.zooniverse.org/projects/tbu...

Just posted - Galaxy Zoo in its 20th Year (from ASP 2026 virtual meeting) blog.galaxyzoo.org/2026/09/17/a...

Almost 1st thing done in Live Astronomy during @dragoncon.org last Friday night - from SARA 1m Kapteyn telescope at La Palma, series of 30s exposures of Nancy Grace Roman space telescope transiting the faint galaxy KOS 222659.3-215011 in Aquarius. (Range 636,000 km)

In honor of the 60th anniversary of the US premier of The Original Series - here's a relevant bit of nebulosity in the middle of NGC 6334, the Catspaw Nebula in Scorpius (in H-alpha, from the SARA Remote 60-cm telescope on Cerro Tololo). Boldly go!

The highlight of my @dragoncon.org experience this year? After possible schedule confusion, I got to be the bad guy chasing the game-design billionarie who's been to orbit off the stage so we could start the 11:30 p.m. Live Astronomy event in Space Track. Maybe that should go on my CV.

(Consults JPL Horizons to see about possible optical imaging of Roman). Wow, it passes the lunar distance late tomorrow afternoon for North American time zones. Currently kind of toward Fomalhaut and trucking right along.

💫 The September 2026 edition of The Evening Sky Map (PDF) is now available for download at skymaps.com/tesm/. It features easy-to-use sky maps for the northern & southern hemispheres and equatorial regions. Enjoy exploring the night sky! 🔭 #stargazing #space #nightsky

Finally finished this Messier gallery with 15-cm Celestron Origin smart scope (images autostacked in the app, some further tweaked for contrast). Exposures 5 minutes (open star clusters) to 90 minutes (galaxies), most from light-polluted suburbia. It's so cool. 🔭 #astro

With a total solar eclipse coming up, this may be useful for first-time eclipse photographers (albeit dating from the era of film). How the corona looks at various exposure levels. I always bracket widely even with a digital SLR.

A most excellent @galaxyzoo.org Voorwerpje system, seen in expertly-processed Hubble data. Like a 90-kiloparsec double helix.

Just got my tentative schedule for @dragoncon.org Space Track. Counting the Live Astronomy events (y'all come!) I'm down for 20 hours of programming. The Con may come when I am too old for this, but it will not be this Con! (Let it not be this Con). But I may be calling Waymos between hotels.

💫 The August 2026 edition of The Evening Sky Map (PDF) is now available for download at skymaps.com/tesm/. The PDF features easy-to-use sky maps for the northern & southern hemispheres and equatorial regions. Please share and enjoy exploring the night sky! 🔭 #stargazing #space #nightsky

Just had my first expeerience shopping at an Ikea store. I have some kind of genetic predisposition toward Mid-Century Modern and they are close enough. (It also seems fitting that there is a secondhand Lego exchange next door. That must be how youngsters are prepared to someday assemble Ikea)

Large scale human collaboration is as beautiful as the cosmos itself (Galaxy Zoo is a citizen science astronomy project where people classify galaxies, started in 2007 and still going!) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_... #astrosky

The Madrid Deep Space Communication Complex at Robledo de Chavela municipality in the Community of Madrid, Spain on fire. Burgohondo wildfire. 📷 via Infues Avila

Submitting abstract for ASP meeting "celebrating 250 years of astronomy in the United States". It seems oddly fitting that co-presenters include one from the US in the US, one from the UK in the US, one from the US in the UK, and one oscillating between US and UK. So we kind of got over it.

Hey, Judy started wth some of my SARA data for this one!

And the Pegasus-XL launch of the Swift Boost Mission has unfortunately been delayed again due to unfavorable weather. The next launch attempt is now scheduled for tomorrow, July 2nd, at 09:09 UTC.

NASA says today's Pegasus XL launch of the Swift reboost mission was scrubbed because of weather, and has been rescheduled for tomorrow. science.nasa.gov/blogs/swift/...

💫 The July 2026 edition of The Evening Sky Map (PDF) is now available for download at skymaps.com/tesm/. The PDF features easy-to-use sky maps for the northern & southern hemispheres and equatorial regions. Please share and enjoy exploring the Universe! 🔭 #stargazing #space #starmap

Today's oddity while organizing Dropbox file trees - from the Space 1986 exhibition in Utrecht, a life-size outline of a Saturn V attached to the 112m cathedral tower (Domtoren).

Hi everybody, I organized the #Artemis2 photos for you. Index pages containing all ~10,000 images in chronological order with time stamps and focal lengths, color coded by which of three cameras was used to shoot them. countlessworlds.com/data/artemis/

So cool. Some features are moving outward at good fractions of c, some are not (standing shocks??)

Today, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope leaves NASA Goddard for the Port of Baltimore to begin its journey to the Kennedy Space Center. This August, Roman will launch into space, broadening our understanding of our solar system & universe. Excited to see it on the move!

Things showing up while organizing assorted Dropboix directories: from a UK visit in 2008, hiking up to the Whte Horse (you know, in White Horse Vale). I get asked for directions a lot, but these all lined up even when I did not have a lab coat or clipboard.

Help scientists find clumps of star-forming regions in galaxies with the @galaxyzoo.org project Clump Scout II on @zooniverse.bsky.social! 1/3 🔭 🧪 #CitizenScience

To blockly go...

Just when anonymous comments on FB have me thinking social media are on life support, quality content like this is a ray of hope.

Ah. That kind of week. We just got the answer to "will the garbage and recycling pickup crews try a second time if their route was blocked by a SWAT team serving a warrant four doors down?" (Thanks, city employees!)

Reasons to continue Hubble operations in the era of JWST, Rubin, Roman... one of the white papers from the community. arxiv.org/abs/2410.011...

💫 The June 2026 edition of The Evening Sky Map (PDF) is now available for download at skymaps.com/tesm/. The PDF features easy-to-use sky maps for the northern & southern hemispheres and equatorial regions. Please share and enjoy exploring the Universe! 🔭 #stargazing #space #starmap

Would you like to rummage data from the Euclid space telescope, and uncover cosmic nurseries where stars like our Sun are born? We're delighted to announce our new @ec-euclid.bsky.social @zooniverse.bsky.social citizen science project, Galaxy Zoo Clump Scout 2 🧪🔭 www.zooniverse.org/projects/hug...