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Benjamin Pope

@benjaminpope.bsky.social
4.7K followers 1.2K following 2.7K posts

Australian astronomer he/him Sydney/Gadi

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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
As you can see in the contrast curve... this candidate is right at the limit of what we can see in these data, so we're not going to go guns blazing claiming this planet - but it's consistent with a resonant chain, and it will be accessible to followup JWST/AMI observations with better calibration.
Contrast curve showing known planet e is recovered at many σ significance and planet f just on the boundary.
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
It's been really exciting to work with @jayke.io, @gradientrider.bsky.social and the rest of this amazing team using JWST's AMI mode to find a fifth candidate planet in the classic HR 8799 system!
Figure from the paper, illustrating the orbits of all 4 previously known planets in HR 8799 and the putative fifth planet, closest to the star in orange.
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Really enjoyed the first @astro-on-tap.sydney event at the Endeavour Tap Rooms last night! Thanks to Nichole Barry, Peter Tuthill, and Orsola De Marco for their talks, @breaky.bsky.social for her logo & stickers, and all our guests for coming!
Nichole Barry, Peter Tuthill, Orsola De Marco, me, Rebecca McElroyThe crowd!
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Macquarie Uni pub has a pretty decent view
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
UNSW are rigorously dedicated to there being only one clear line of sight on campus but at least it’s a good one
UNSW main axis
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Gotta say Vienna is pretty good
Kaiserschmarrn in front of St Stephen’s
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
Should probably decarbonise our HPC eh
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
Super proud of @gradientrider.bsky.social winning the @astrosocaus.bsky.social ECR Software Prize for his optics code dLux!
Emerging Leaders in Astronomy Software Development Prize (sponsored by the Australian Research Data Commons)
Awarded to Dr Louis Desdoigts (Sydney, now at Leiden University) for ∂Lux - a physical optics simulation package that is fast, differentiable, and deploys to GPU and HPC environments. It is the base package behind AMIGO: a data-driven model of the Aperture Masking Interferometer (AMI), the only Australian hardware on JWST.
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
Cafe cockatoos at Macquarie
Cockatoos at a cafe table
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
Not a bad view for doing oral exams today
View of Macquarie Uni grounds
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
Super happy to finish the last class of semester with a bang, with a guest panel on values and communication in science featuring Dr Ceridwen Dovey, Prof Noushin Nasiri, and Dr Jenny Newell - and lots of student engagement giving me hope for the future!
Dr Ceridwen Dovey, Prof Noushin Nasiri, Dr Jenny Newell, and me
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
the Eastern Suburbs feel haunted in a very specific way, by the ghost of their missing tram lines
map showing the formerly-extensive Eastern Suburbs tram lines
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
I do not need to ask Slackbot fun questions about what animal I would be. Why would I want that
"Based on my activity in Slack, what animal would I be" suggested Slackbot prompt
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 26/04/2026
- in what natural process is there ever a colour progression that looks like this - what fraction of these colours make you feel queasy? for me about 40%
cubehelix colourbar
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
David Williamson: "No one in Sydney ever wastes time debating the meaning of life - it's getting yourself a water frontage. People devote a lifetime to the quest"
A yacht: “Dasein”
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
Photo from just yesterday. Brett Whitely can’t even improve on it
Sailing boats on the harbour in front of the city skyline
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
smbc has a terry tao guest comic and it's nice to be the target market for something www.smbc-comics.com/comic/sphere...
wizard: by the power of Fourier, I banish you from function space to frequency space!
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 05/04/2026
Does not disappoint
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
Not a bad view from where I’m teaching
View of the lake at Macquarie University
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
really like the new Macquarie AAO building
Geometric pattern under dappled light on the windows of the new MQ AAO building
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
this lede has Crowley energy
un-transcribable bit of text with many languages and diacritics at the end of the introduction to Magick in Theory and Practice by Aleister Crowley "of Trinity College, Cambridge"
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
We have a large & friendly astronomy dept, great food, and a lovely campus a short metro ride from the city. We have a large cohort of students and a great grad program - join us!
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
First seminar at MQ by our new postdoc Mark Fortune, fresh from Trinity College Dublin!
Mark Fortune and his first slide
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
didn't really need this notification popping up at random in every slack I'm in
slack notification about AI searches
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
and not in a good way!
Australia Mentioned meme
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
Up in the nosebleed section today
Not a particularly good view of the SCG
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
Beyond excited to see the announcement of the Lazuli Space Observatory project - a 3m optical space telescope concept developed by Schmidt Sciences, with an integral field spectrograph, coronagraph, and widefield imager. What a mission!
Diagram of the Lazuli Space Observatory, labelling its 3m telescope, and the instruments: an Integral Field Spectrograph, a Widefield Context Camera, and an ExtraSolar Camera coronagraph
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
Day for it
The SCG in the Ashes
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
Criminal that the SCG uses so much parkland for car parking. Gotta put a metro station here
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 05/12/2025
broke: dot products woke: einsums bespoke: a machine learning library in Penrose graphical notation github.com/thomasahle/t...
some Penrose tensors
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 19/11/2025
Newcastle make up your mind
Signs: Beach St, No Access to Beach
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 18/11/2025
Terrifically funny to just have a monument to Coal, the Concept, in Newcastle. It’s just a cube of coal on a heavily vandalised plinth. What a country
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 07/11/2025
this paragraph could apply in so many science contexts
The sense I get is unfortunately that technical leadership is often particularly bad at this: teams and business units are seen as being more or less interchangeable morasses of "tech person", that can thus be reorganised at will and placed under an endlessly rotating stream of leaders and still function. This is profoundly not how technical teams work.
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 28/10/2025
this but physicists with the Ising model
Liberal: *through sobs* you can't just say everything is nationalised.... Please....
Corbyn: *points at seagull flying past* nationalised
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 21/10/2025
Really, truly affecting talk today, that I will be thinking about for a long time
Photo of Omar El Akkad speaking with Sisonke Msimang at the State Library of New South Wales
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 21/10/2025
the ARC RMS interface is what you take if you apply the CIA sabotage manual as a software development paradigm
(8) Make mistakes in routing so that parts and materials will be sent to the wrong place in the plant.
(9) When training new workers, give incomplete or misleading instructions.
(10) To lower morale and with it, produc-tion, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efcient workers; complain unjustly about their work.
{11) Hold conferences when there Is more
critical work to be done.
(12) Multiply paper work in plausible ways.
Start duplicate Ales.
(13) Multiply the procedures and clearances Involved In issuing Instructlons, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do..
(14) Apply all regulations to the last letter.
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
I especially want to call out @spiralstar.bsky.social for his vision and leadership, from designing AMI, proposing targets, supervising these projects, solving problems, and being a fantastic mentor to all of us. We were delighted to see him honoured with the Michelson Prize in 2024 for this.
Peter Tuthill at his desk, with Keck masks in the background
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
We can see Io rotate slightly over the hour-long timelapse, tracking volcanoes on its surface! And check out the Conversation piece for a cool slider showing how NGC 1068 lines up perfectly with previous data from LBTI.
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
The raw data look like messy interferograms that are hard to understand by eye - and we enhance these data to restore beautiful images of the environment of the black hole in NGC 1068, Jupiter's moon Io, and a dusty binary system WR 137.
3x3 multipanel figure showing the AMI imaging results. Top to bottom: raw data, calibrator, and restored images, for the active galaxy NGC 1068, Jupiter's moon Io, and the colliding-wind binary WR 137.
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
By forward-modelling through this, we can reverse out what the uncorrupted images look like, recovering known planets at the theoretical photon noise and diffraction limit of AMI. I told Louis it would Just Work™ and two years and tens of thousands of lines of code later, he made it work.
Thresholded and composite version of Figure 16 from the paper, showing detection maps for known companions B and C to the star HD 206893. In the full figure, there is a lot more scruff, where low-probability regions are shown so the shape of this sensitivity pattern can be clearly understood.Contrast curves for the HD 206893 data. The brighter companion at 200 mas is clearly recovered and the fainter companion at 100 mas is marginally recovered. The empirical curves (lines with shaded regions) closely match the theoretical photon noise limits (dotted lines), and the curve is flat right up to the diffraction limit just inside of 100 mas.
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
Now we are able to correct the mask metrology, infer the wavefront, and infer the mask is not *quite* in focus. We also learn the pixel sensitivities and a neural network for how pixels interact with their neighbours - this 'effective detector model' is probably the most impactful part of the paper.
Multi-panel figure showing the calibrated metrology of the mask, and the inferred effects of telescope jitter, aberrations, mask metrology, and Fresnel defocus on the interferograms.Multipanel figure showing the detector model - intra-pixel response (the map of a single pixel's sensitivity shape), inter-pixel response (the gain of each pixel separately) and nonlinearity, along with a model for how charge bleeds from bright pixels into their neighbours (the brighter-fatter effect).
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
The Aperture Masking Interferometer (AMI) is a tiny piece of metal in Webb's NIRISS camera, filtering light through a pattern of holes where no pairs are have the same direction and spacing. This means that we can unambiguously tie changes in the telescope images to the optics ('phase retrieval').
The AMI mask, with seven hexagonal holes in a circular piece of metal superimposed with the JWST mirror shape.a photo of me with the mask for scale
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 10/10/2025
I feel like I'm going insane that the Herald and the Foreign Minister are discussing peace in Palestine in terms of a fanciful peace prize for Trump. We're on aestheticization of politics level 7 or 8 by now and it's so dumb
SMH: "Why Trump is unlikely to win Nobel Peace Prize, even with breakthrough"
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 09/10/2025
Super proud of @tamarastro.bsky.social winning this year’s Moyal Medal!
Tamara Davis pointing at a picture of herself on a big screen listing Moyal Medal recipientsDean of Science Prof Sam Muller awarding Tamara Davis the Moyal Medal
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 09/10/2025
Excited to have a tour today of the new AAO building at Macquarie, where the astronomers and engineers are just beginning to bump into their new facilities! The atrium and forum are going to be awesome event spaces and the labs are enormous.
View of a student study area, curtained with chain links View of a huge lab, currently full of boxes as it is set up View of The Forum, an event and social space at the front of the new AAOView of the atrium looking out, with staircases spanning a large airy space
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 09/10/2025
Wonderful to tour the new Jim Piper Centre at Macquarie, and see Paula Dawson’s To Absent Friends in the new gallery!
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
Love this city
Darling Harbour at sunset
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 02/10/2025
went with these great books for top100books.abc.net.au but the longlist is just absolutely chaos, picking the worst books of good authors and missing others entirely...
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 30/09/2025
Not a bad view from the IAC meeting
Darling Harbour
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Benjamin Pope @benjaminpope.bsky.social · 03/09/2025
Ready for Aunty Donna
Me, Chris Betters, Tim White at the Enmore Theatre
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