John Young @jsy1001@social.cleverlibre.org

For this year's gingerbread I made... the VLA!

#gingerbread #astronomy #radioastronomy #space

This image of NGC 2264, also known as the “Christmas Tree Cluster,” shows the shape of a cosmic tree with the glow of stellar lights.

NGC 2264 is a cluster of young #stars — with ages between about one and five million years old — in our Milky Way about 2,500 light-years away from Earth.

The stars in NGC 2264 range from some with less than a tenth the mass of the Sun to others containing about seven solar masses.

#astronomy #astrophotography
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/telescopes-illuminate-christmas-tree-cluster/

“These men collectively have more than half a trillion dollars to spend on their quest to realize inventions culled from the science fiction and fantasy stories that they read in their teens. But this is tremendously bad news because the past century’s science fiction and fantasy works widely come loaded with dangerous assumptions." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tech-billionaires-need-to-stop-trying-to-make-the-science-fiction-they-grew-up-on-real/

The is the best attempt to write down some of the conventions of CLI design that I've seen. I particularly love the explanations and links to further reading https://clig.dev/ Turns out? Some of those unwritten rules are written after all! #linkTuesday

Achievement unlocked! The first 18 segments of the primary mirror of ESO's Extremely Large #Telescope are on their way to #Chile 🇨🇱

The huge 39.3 m mirror of the telescope will comprise 798 of these hexagonal segments, plus 133 spares, as we'll eventually have to remove a couple of them every day to recoat them with a reflective layer.

More details: https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2319/

Video summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urHSJx_kwDM

#astronomy #astrodon #technology #engineering

Mozilla, the makers of the Firefox web browser, now have their own Mastodon instance that people within the Fediverse can join (open to the public).

It is Mozilla dot social

#Mastodon #Fediverse #Mozilla #Firefox #FOSS #OpenSource

There is no rational reason for Mastodon to limit posts to 500 characters by default.

If the limit was 100s of KB, people who still wanted to divide every thought up into a thread still could; nothing stopping them.

But if someone wanted to post a gigantic essay, they also could, and I'd see a little "More >>" link and I could ignore them faster.

We have decades of history proving that length limits do not make people concise: they just make people post threads.

i was going to wait to tell the “who called it ‘secret santa’ instead of ‘non-disclosure claus’?” joke until it was closer to christmas, but i figured i’d totally forget, so i’m telling it now.

I'm very much at that stage where I can't tell if LinkedIn (where else?) posts are a joke

Lol

The sky put on such a show the other night.

The dark tree branches against the orange & pink swirls had me a bit awestruck. Haunting, but so beautiful.

Not great photography by any means, esp compared to what other people post. Just snaps over the fence (the trees are in the alley behind my house).

But I dunno. It was such a magical moment & I can't resist sharing those. 🧡

#sunset #photography #NaturePhotography

Reposted from @MostlyHarmless with alt-text.

It seems the REF 2028 is delayed to 2029. That should give the #HiddenRef and us more time to get ready. https://wonkhe.com/wonk-corner/ref-delayed-until-2029/

The best time to learn #emacs and #orgmode is ten years ago. The second best time is today. I use #orgmode as my calendar and organiser, and each year I discover something more awesome in it. I didn't realise how good the exporter is and how well formed the HTML is, so now I'll keep my notes on astronomy literature in a new org file. Future proofing through flat text files FTW.

The ASTOUNDING huge big news out of COP28 "so far" is Biden's comitment to not just build NO MORE, not one, coal plant ever again, but the cycle down and Replace ALL COAL PLANTS NOW within 12 years.

US TO REPLACE COAL PLANTS

Coal is 20% of the US power system. That is construction of massive size. Terawats of renewable construction. Funding for remefiation for energy industry jobs, protecting former coal communities.

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/12/biden-cop28-coal/

#COP28 #climate #klima #climat #coal

Wow, this @xkcd is really excellent.

#Space tip: if you’re ever lost in the inner #solar system, you can just type out the phrase “Optimistic #Aliens measure space typographically” in times new roman and use the dots as a #map

😅

from: https://xkcd.com/2863/

#Astronomy #Meme #Mastodon

Aaaah, the satisfaction of seeing the green check mark appear on a build with #ShowYourWork https://show-your.work/en/latest/ means that my paper's scientific workflow is reproducible! h/t @dfm #ReproducibleScience

For my outreach account on instagram, I am running an advent calendar introducing an #exoplanet a day. I call this calendar #ExoAdvent and figured I could share it here too! ⭐️ 🌎 🪐

A thread 🧵

I rented a car to go to a Christmas market this weekend and yesterday morning the car was covered in the most beautiful frost patterns, utterly breathtaking. There is beauty in so many things.

For those who are members in the church of #emacs 🤓

Saturday and Sunday: #emacsconf 2023

🔎 Have a look at:
https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/

#foss #opensource #freesoftware #gnu