iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 07/08/2026

Trying out my eclipse glasses for next week 😎

A photo of me holding up the eclipse glasses to the Sun. The lens is completely black except for the disk of the Sun.

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 06/08/2026

The Wikipedia featured article widget is unreasonably funny today

A screenshot of the Wikipedia featured article widget, featuring the article “Big Duck” with a photo of a friggin’ massive plastic duck.

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 24/06/2026

Why does he look so good in sunglasses

My golden retriever wearing sunglasses and looking far cooler than I could ever hope to

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 31/05/2026

I’ve never been more scared of scare quotes

A coffee van named “Real” coffee, with quotes around the word real.

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 08/02/2026

The kids kept me awake so much the Health app is trying to console me

Sheep stats showing I got 2 hours 47 minutes of interrupted sleep, with the summary “Bad nights of sleep happen. To recover, try to get to bed on time tonight.”

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 07/09/2025

Got another shot, with slightly less cloud 🔭

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 07/09/2025

Out for a nighttime dog walk and caught the eclipse through the clouds 🔭

The partially eclipsed moon seen through a gap in the clouds. Trees in silhouette and a street light in the foreground.

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 07/09/2025

Objectively harder to read with Liquid Glass

A screenshot of my phone running the new iOS beta, showing today’s UK test emergency alert on the lock screen, with transparency making it hard to read against my wallpaper.

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 08/08/2025

Apparently GPT-5 is a PhD-level expert on "everything" yet it can't correctly identify an incorrectly folded light curve of a pulsating star. It looks nothing like an eclipsing binary or an exoplanet. I think my job is safe for now 🧪🔭

Screenshot of a ChatGPT session where I asked it to identify a light curve of a pulsating star. It correctly stated it was a phase-folded light curve, before incorrectly saying it's either an eclipsing binary or exoplanet.

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 27/07/2025

My son (4) asked me to build him a den. Luckily he drew me a detailed plan of how it should look 😬

A photo of incomprehensible scribbles on paper.

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 08/07/2025

Ordered a solar filter from eBay and this is how it arrived 😒 I'm finding it surprisingly hard to find these to buy online. Can anyone recommend somewhere (in the UK) to buy filters for a Celestron Astromaster 130? 🔭

A photo of the solar filter, which has a small hole rendering it unusable.

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 29/05/2025

All I know is my phone does this with old events in Google calendars. Here’s it copying the details of a gig I attended in 2013. It’s just doing a text search of the titles.

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 19/05/2025

Was just outside and happened to look up and see the International Space Station. Probably the fifth or sixth time I’ve seen it by accident. It’s the bright one (obviously) 🔭

A photo of the night sky. There are rooftops at the bottom of the photo. In the sky are clouds and a few stars are visible between them. The ISS stands out brighter than any star, and slightly elongated from its motion.

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 14/05/2025

Wow! Just look at this photo of the Milky Way taken by astronaut Don Pettit on the ISS. Taken with a homemade tracker to counteract the orbital motion. It kind of looks like an aurora, but that's actually just clouds just before dawn. The purple colour comes from nitrogen scattering sunlight. 🧪🔭

The dense stars and dust clouds of the Milky Way are visible, running vertically, in the top two thirds of the photo. At the bottom is the Earth, covered in clouds dimly lit by the pre-dawn sun. Running along the curve of the Earth is a hazy purple glow.

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 29/04/2025

Wow, how have I never seen this photo until now? The atmosphere of Mars, taken by Viking 1 in 1976 🔭🧪 en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ma...

This Viking 1 orbiter image shows the thin atmosphere of Mars. The mountains of the southern Argyre Basin is visible, with Galle crater left of center. Viking image number is 040A63. The photo was taken through red color filter.

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 21/01/2025

This composite image from last year of the microquasar SS 433 still amazes me. You can see where the black hole is, and 100 light years from that you can see the jets it is creating, and surrounding all that is the remnant of the supernova that created it. chandra.si.edu/photo/2024/s... 🔭🧪

Composite image showing X-ray, infrared, and radio observations of SS 433. A bright dot in the centre is the black hole, visible in all wavelengths. A distance to the left of that is a jet, visible in the X-ray, extending horizontally away from the black hole. The other jet (they always come in pairs) is not visible. Surrounding that is the nebula, visible in IR and radio, round in the centre but elongated along the horizontal where the black hole's jets have pushed the material further outwards.

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 18/01/2025

“The empire’s largest jeweller” 😬

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 20/12/2024

Finally a clear night to have a go with the new telescope 🔭 Lessons learned: 1. Focusing takes a very fine touch 2. Even a little wind is annoying 3. I should wear thicker socks!

A photo of the Moon taken through the eyepiece. It’s three quarters full and the photo is a little hazy.

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 26/11/2024

For motivation while I was writing my PhD thesis I kept a record of the word count each day as I was working. Here's a chart of the total – can you spot when I finally got the last bits of my code working so I could just focus on writing? 😂🔭🧪

A graph of the total words written vs time. The vertical axis goes from 0 to 35,000 words and the horizontal axis starts at 18 March 2024 and ends at 18 October 2024. The total starts at about 5,000 and increases steadily to about 15,000 by 18 July 2024. Then it suddenly increases to about 30,000 by 18 August 2024, before plateauing for the remaining time.

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 20/11/2024

20 years ago today! The Swift gamma ray satellite launched on 20 November 2004 on a mission to study gamma ray bursts and other high energy phenomena. The mission was planned to last two years yet it's still going strong 🧪🔭

The Swift satellite launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on a Delta II rocket. This photo shows the rocket as it clears the launch tower, with clouds of exhaust billowing below it. Image: NASA (Public domain)

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 20/11/2024

Relativistic beaming is Special Relativity's way of making things moving towards us look brighter than things moving away from us. It's also the reason the Event Horizon Telescope images are brighter on one side – that side is rotating towards us 🔭🧪 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativ...

The Event Horizon Telescope image of the black hole in M87. We see a ring of yellow-orange, like a fuzzy doughnut. It's brighter on one side. The centre, where the black hole is, is black.

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 20/11/2024

You’ve probably seen the first black hole image. This is the galaxy that hosts it, M87. It has a huge 5,000 light year jet streaming away from the black hole. The best part? There’s another jet going the other way, hidden by relativistic beaming as it’s travelling at nearly the speed of light 🧪🔭

The galaxy is a hazy circle of light, with a bright centre. The jet is bright, coming from the centre in a straight line; it’s uneven, some parts brighter than others. Image credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) • Public domain

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 19/11/2024

On mine you’d need to turn this square bit with a spanner I think

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 17/11/2024

The Moon is right next to Jupiter at the moment. Jupiter is the bright one just to the right of the Moon 🔭 Also it still amazes me how good phones are at taking photos in low light now.

A photo of the night sky, with a few stars plus the moon and Jupiter. The Moon is over exposed because it’s so bright, but the stars and Jupiter are pretty clear.

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 17/11/2024

Post a picture you took (no description) to bring some zen to the timeline

A photo of the Grand Canyon with a handful of trees in the foreground.

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 15/11/2024

The Moon looking creepy tonight 🔭

The full Moon shining through a gap in heavy clouds

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 24/10/2024

I absolutely loved mine. I saw one at the Computer History Museum in California and was so excited I took a photo.

A Speak & Spell on display at the Computer History Museum, alongside an assortment of other retro electronic items.

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 22/10/2024

Finished proofreading the thesis today! Just got to fix some typos and make some other minor changes. I think I’ll be submitting tomorrow 🧪🔭

A photo of a printout of my PhD thesis sitting on my desk. It’s a decent sized stack of paper. The title is “Citizen Science Classification of
Long-Baseline Stellar Variabilly in the SuperWASP All-Sky Survey”.

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 17/10/2024

I got the comet! It wasn’t visible at all with the naked eye and I didn’t expect to actually be able to see it in the photo. Also got photobombed by Starlink 🧪🔭

The night sky, with the glow from the recently set Sun visible behind some buildings. Almost lost in the haze is the comet, with its fuzzy tail extending behind it. Nearby, the Starlink satellites form a line of lights, elongated due to their movement during the long photo exposure.

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 11/10/2024

The entire sky is full of colour 🔭🧪

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 05/05/2024

Absolutely love how much the Vera Rubin Observatory’s camera just looks like the lens of a giant DSLR 🔭🧪 (Photo from rubinobservatory.org/explore/tech...)

The camera of the Rubin observatory. It looks like a normal camera lens, but huge. There’s a person standing next to it and it’s bigger than them.

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Adam McMaster @adammc.space · 27/04/2024

In 1919, George Owen Squier published an article on his work experimenting with using trees as radio antennas. It worked surprisingly well and he dubbed his new invention the "floraphone". I asked MS Copilot to imagine the floraphone, and it suggested adding a surprised squirrel to the image. #ai

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