Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 30/09/2026yeah it's hard to imagine why you got no response from my end 011
Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 29/09/2026I feel the picture choice adds to the bathos here 000
Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 10/08/2026This is the third separate fire I have seen reported as being of this very specific size. Is it the official threshold for being newsworthy? 100
Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 25/05/2026Right on cue, look what I just found in my bathroom. I guess maybe they're having a good year...? 110
Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 22/05/2026In the younger galaxy, the second component is easy to identify: it's basically a carbon star spectrum. Not unexpected, since we know there's a ~1Gyr population here, but isolated very nicely and will help put limits on the TP-AGB contributions. 000
Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 22/05/2026... But Mira variables look like this, in the cool, faint part of their pulsation cycles. (And we already saw red variables blinking on and off in our old MUSE data). 100
Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 22/05/2026In the old galaxy, the first component spectrum just looks like normal M giants. Second one has the curvature of a really really cool giant. There are none of those in our regular models... 100
Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 22/05/2026Individual stars here are far too faint to extract spectra, so we play the fluctuations game, running a PCA on the pixel spectra. Mapping the component contributions across the field gives a nice colour "image" that maximises the information carried. 100
Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 22/05/2026New paper out on the arxiv today. arxiv.org/abs/2605.21588 Here's figure 1, showing the ERIS fields we observed in NGC5128 as an example (mostly) old population, and NGC5102, a post-starburst galaxy. 130
Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 19/05/2026And my weird "sky" features are the N2+ lines from the aurora, as seen from La Palma (Lat +29). 010
Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 19/05/2026... which is about how long it takes for the charged particles to arrive. 110
Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 19/05/2026Zooming in, the data with the weird "sky" (red line) were taken ~half a day after the solar flux spiked on 18th Jan... 100
Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 19/05/2026Spent too long today trying to figure out the weird sky lines in some WEAVE spectra 100
Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 17/05/2026Did the compass survey thing. Apparently there's a chance that I might not be American. 000
Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 17/05/2026I enjoyed the commentary: "it's possible you might not be American" 000
Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 19/04/2026Since everyone seems to be posting their Sunday walk pictures today 100
Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 17/04/2026All these years an Economist subscriber and you don't know me at all. 000
Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 13/02/2026Another one, from Whiting's history of the university (Durham, of course...) 110
Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 13/02/2026Almost an incident when I saw some of these loose in the cupboard and thought they might be tasmine tea 010
Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 28/01/2026Not so many colleges, I think, but an interesting view of the buildings around the observatory and science area. Can't see much of the DWB physics building, but the van de graaf generator building is in there... 220
Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 09/09/202525 years enough to drop it into the detector gap... 000
Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 03/09/2025Taken a bit longer than we hoped, but our MUSE NFM observations of nearby lens SNL1 are on arxiv today... arxiv.org/abs/2509.01732 100
Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 31/07/2025Very pleased with today's "image" of (a very tiny piece of) NGC 5128 100
Russell Smith @astrorjs.bsky.social · 23/07/2025here's the branding we were asked to use by our lot, a few years back 011
