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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈

@astronoray.bsky.social
97 followers 54 following 176 posts

Astronomer. Nature photographer. Astro postdoc at Texas A&M. he/him. Georgia native, College Station resident.

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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
And with that, my first ever JWST proposal has been submitted! 🥳
static.klipy.com
Friends Phoebe
ALT: Friends Phoebe
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
My aunt is at a Sara Bareilles concert (my favorite artist), and my best friend is at a Hayley Williams concert. Meanwhile, I’m sitting here trying to figure out how to convince the JWST TAC to let me use the telescope 🙃
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Listen kids, always collect data to back up your claims. JWST proposals are noticeably stressing me out and my watch is worried 😬
A chart from an iPhone showing the user’s resting heart rate rising from a 54 bpm baseline to 66 bpm over the last week.
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I’ve turned my mother into an astronomer. She texted me at 5:30 AM to ask me why we don’t observe lithium 😅
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
All ready to talk about my latest work about the stellar populations of M101 with HETDEX! I’m presenting at the 10th Annual Postdoctoral Research Symposium here at TAMU!
A picture of a research poster. A large plot fills the center of the poster with words on either side.
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Markus Pössel @mpoessel.de · 10/09/2026
When we do outreach or education, astronomers frequently claim that public and student interest in astronomy is greater than in other sciences, making it an ideal entry way for science. My article analyzing Wikipedia page views which (somewhat) supports this claim is out in the CAP Journal. 🔭⚛️🧪🎢
capjournal.org
English-speaking Wikipedia users’ interest in astronomy
Wikipedia users’ interest in astronomy is examined using data available for pageviews over the period 2016–2025. Interest, as measured by the level of engagement, is gauged by examining the top 30 ast...
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Today I start a three day brainstorming session at an undisclosed location in Texas for JWST proposals that are due in… 3 weeks! And I haven’t started writing at all.
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
I'm now a part of a JWST collaboration called "Carbon-3 Plus Oxygen", aka C3PO. I have to find a way to get R2D2 into a paper title.
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
First Dolly, now Tim Curry???! Alright, put your loved ones in bubble wrap to protect them.
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
A tweet from user iamemployedaf reading “It’s going to be tough to tumble out of bed and stumble to the kitchen tomorrow… but we’ll do it. We’ll pour ourselves a cup of ambition and rise to the occasion. For Dolly.”
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Man, just fully brought to tears over losing Dolly
A collage of pictures of Dolly Parton over the words “Do It For Her”
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
How it started -> how it's going! The green circle is the R25 radius, centered on the NGC 5474's kinematic center.
A 2 by 2 array of images of the same dwarf galaxy, NGC 5474. The top row shows broadband imaging; the galaxy has an offset circular compact bulge to the north and faint spiral arms. The bottom row shows H-alpha imaging; there are numerous star-forming regions. Each column was taken by a separate telescope; there is a clear resolution difference between the left and right columns, with the better resolution on the right.
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John @drspiff.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
I’m assuming you know Pat Durrell but if you don’t you now should.
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
You can tell I turned 30 recently cause I'm really starting to get into the band Rush 😂
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Well, I've finally joined the club: I'm on a paper about LRDs! arxiv.org/abs/2608.04101
arxiv.org
Implications of Broad [O III] 4364 and UV Line Emission in Two Little Red Dots at z ~ 7 - 8
We present deep, NIRSpec G140M and G395M spectroscopy of Little Red Dots (LRDs) at z = 6.68 and z = 8.35. Both LRDs show broad Balmer and [O III] $λ$4364 emission. The broad [O III] $λ$4364 lines have...
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Aaron Sojourner @aaronsojourner.org · 25/07/2026
Admirable clarity @science.org
The Trump administration hates academic science funding, full stop. They hate where that money goes, and they hate who it goes to. They want to keep all that money for themselves, to hand out to favored cronies who can help them get elected and to steer yet more money and more power back into their hands.

That’s it. That’s the story
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Of course, I’ve been tired all day and didn’t take a nap. Now it’s 1:30 AM, I’m not super tired anymore, and my brain is coming up with research ideas 🙄
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Who was gonna tell me that Coca Cola is $12 at the grocery store???
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Question to the people of Bluesky: what are y'all's hobbies? I've got a list of things that I consider hobbies (photography & reading mainly), but if I'm honest, it's mostly zoning out and watching YouTube (or work tbh). What do y'all spend your time doing?
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Eliot Halley Vrijmoet @eliothalley.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
Hey everyone! Our AAS committee, SGMA, wrote a 'comment' article for Nature Astronomy -- now published just in time for Pride! You can access it free via this link: rdcu.be/fplJd We also wrote an accompanying Q&A article to profile a few of our committee members: rdcu.be/fpk42 🧪🔭🌈
rdcu.be
Building a culture of inclusion and allyship for queer astronomers
Nature Astronomy - The American Astronomical Society (AAS) Committee for Sexual-Orientation and Gender Minorities in Astronomy (SGMA) is tasked with supporting the community and promoting...
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
I'm listening to Steely Dan's album "Aja" for the first time in a long while, and I forgot how good "Deacon Blues" is! www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICK6...
youtube.com
Deacon Blues
YouTube video by Steely Dan - Topic
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
I love working on something for two days only to realize that I’m not getting interesting results out of it 🙃
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
I’d like to announce my availability as the next showrunner of Doctor Who. I promise to bring back monsters made of aluminum foil and bubble wrap
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
What do you call a group of united popes? An Eminence Front! (I’m so tickled by this joke I came up with.) youtu.be/MRI4UmRyXU4?...
youtu.be
Eminence Front
YouTube video by The Who - Topic
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
Case Western had some interesting recruiting tactics. Hard to say no to a swarm of bees! 🐝
A commemorative brick in a path with the sentence “I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees” engraved on it.
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Dr. Craig DeForest ☀️ @craig.deforest.org · 20/05/2026
Holy cow! Feast your eyes a while, on this gorgeous solar spectrum by the Sol'Ex instrument (assembled by Váradi Nagy Pál). It extends to UV and IR as well as the visible band. Marvel at the F lines, the fine structure, the IR doublets and repeating lines, and the molecular bands. Wonderful! ☀️🧪⚛️🔭
A very broadband solar spectrum reveals the colors of UV, visible light, and infrared light that are missing from the solar spectrum.  The spectrum was collected by the "Sol'Ex" instrument, and assembled by Váradi Nagy Pál.
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
Well, I can cross “have a job interview at 1 AM” off my bucket list. 🙃 Curse you time zones!!
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
Two weeks ago, I gave an address to the postdocs here at TAMU as part of our annual General Assembly. This past year has not been a good year for postdocs: we've faced federal funding cuts, a harsh job market, and immigration/visa issues. astronoraygarner.com/post/pda_gen... 1/🧵
astronoraygarner.com
Postdocs Are Resilient | Ray Garner
This past year has not been a good year for postdocs. We've faced federal funding cuts, a harsh job market, and many of us have faced looming immigration and visa issues. Yet, through all of that, thi...
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
Maybe a controversial opinion, but I think Chicago III is the best Chicago album
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
Man, it feels good to submit a paper for a project I've been working on for three years.
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
Going from no interviews for months to four interviews in one week is an amazing feeling! 🤩
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
Me, degrading JWST images to match optical images:
media.tenor.com
a man in a suit and tie is crying and says " look how they massacred my boy "
Alt: a man in a suit and tie is crying and says " look how they massacred my boy "
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 27/04/2026
I think my research might be possessed.
A scientific plot with a smoothing function applied to it so that the colors make it appear like an evil smiling face.
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 28/03/2026
On the one hand, I’m glad the fixed the warped floor around the toilet. On the other hand, that’s not where the toilet goes
An image of a toilet in a bathtub An image of where a toilet would be in a bathroom, but all that’s there is a hole in the ground where the drainage pipe is
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
Ah, have any of us considered that?
A screenshot of a weather app. The temperature reads 58 degrees Fahrenheit in College Station. Below the temperature, the app says, “Everything inside you was originally made in the interior of a collapsing star. But! It was a weak and boring star that nobody liked.”
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Ethan Siegel @startswithabang.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
Many things have impacted American astronomy over the past few years. The peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The collapse of Arecibo. The rise of megaconstellations. But the federal destruction and dismantling of research, NASA, NSF and more from 2025-present has killed jobs like nothing else.
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Liℤℤy Kodpuak née Acid Lich (can’t spell sheaves without she) @acidlich.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
Honestly this is what kills me about this nonsense, why are you doing a fucking phd if you don’t want to do the reading
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
Always great when your background image looks like a face staring back at you, wondering what you're doing!
An abstract grayscale image. The dark and light spots appear to form the shape of a face.
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Julianne Dalcanton @dalcantonjd.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
Because “looking at images, not catalogs” is a dying pastime, the paper includes a tutorial on -how- to interpret images of galaxies. Qualitative information alone can get you a surprisingly long way towards a reasonable model, if you’re thinking through the links between morphology and physics.
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
“Don’t forget to turn your clocks forward an hour!” Jokes on you, I never changed my oven clock back from the last time!
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
I woke up at 3 AM and I still somehow managed to miss this morning’s eclipse 🙃
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
I put on some background video game music while I write the conclusion section of this paper and immediately the first song was an ominous dungeon song. This paper isn't gonna be easy, is it?
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Mike Boylan-Kolchin @mbkplus.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
David Hogg has written a white paper on doing astrophysics in the age of LLMs. It looks to be thought-provoking. My initial reaction is that either LLMs will destroy the field or they will force a reckoning with and re-imagining of the current system that often prioritizes output over quality. 🧪
arxiv.org
Why do we do astrophysics?
At time of writing, large language models (LLMs) are beginning to obtain the ability to design, execute, write up, and referee scientific projects on the data-science side of astrophysics. What implic...
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Shaily Patel @vox-magica.bsky.social · 08/02/2026
i went back to a tougher, pre-covid syllabus for my intro NT class this term. students have been rising to the occasion magnificently. like, for real, i was expecting a bunch of drops after day 1. i got emails and office visits instead. it’s making for a very fun teaching term!
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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 05/02/2026
Thread.
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Emily St. James @emilystjams.bsky.social · 05/02/2026
It's kind of amazing how the worst consequence many of our most powerful people can conceive of is someone being mad at them online, to the degree that they are driven to distraction about it even in the abstract.
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Dr./Prof. Meredith MacGregor @mmacgreg.bsky.social · 05/02/2026
Our AAS Education Committee report on 'The Landscape of Undergraduate Astronomy and Astrophysics Degree Requirements' is now available on arXiv: www.arxiv.org/abs/2602.03959. Please give it a read!
arxiv.org
The Landscape of Undergraduate Astronomy and Astrophysics Degree Requirements
In this document we summarize the results of a survey of undergraduate degree-granting programs conducted by the 2024-2025 American Astronomical Society Education Committee's Subcommittee on UndeRgrad...
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Omg. WTF is Happening? @lalahaenzy.bsky.social · 05/02/2026
Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again. #Pinks #ProudBlue
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Ray Garner 🏳️‍🌈 @astronoray.bsky.social · 04/02/2026
Question: how do we feel about land acknowledgements in the acknowledgements section of a paper?
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