Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 06/10/2026One last thing: my absolute favorite figure from the paper isn't the "hey, we made a star look small" picture, but this: a temporal power spectrum of the wavefront error with and without AO, laser and natural. If you know what those words mean we can be friends. 1100
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 09/06/2026I feel like the people in their astronomy department might need to revisit the whole “telescopes: do they go indoors?“ question 050
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 16/05/2026For me I suppose this one has a certain amount of definitiveness in direct imaging, at least until we get an Earth. 060
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 12/04/2026we can see the outer equivalent - like Kuiper belt dust - around dozens of other stars; mostly younger stars whose small bodies haven’t settled down and so are colliding thousands of times more than our system. This gallery is from GPI (Esposito et al.) vcresearch.berkeley.edu/sites/defaul... 2285
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 15/03/2026Best it could find was He II . Is ionization hell? 051
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 10/03/2026Lovely images! So many beautiful galaxies. Are the images black-on-white negatives (a) to bring out faint structure, or (b) to give a deliberately retro photographic plate vibe? Please say b. 140
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 10/02/2026We all show this figure, but I seriously agree with Peter that we need to rethink that. It tells a story but doesn't actually convey more than one or two important facts. It's almost ritualistic. 4152
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 22/01/2026@lickobservatory.bsky.social update: the dome is now sealed! Thanks to the summit staff, contractors, and main-campus staff for an amazing amount of work over the past four months. Now we can catch our breath and plan how to checkout/repair the telescope and the dome. 35510
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 02/01/2026And then finally Dr. Gates dug up this terrifying video of the actual fall striking sparks as it hits the parking lot. Plus lightning flashes. Sad to watch but nice use of multi-messenger science to track down the event. 080
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 02/01/2026Firewatch cameras show the shutter on the dome at 3:16 and on the ground at 3:18 160
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 02/01/2026Weather records show the highest winds then, and a disturbingly large drop in barometric pressure 130
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 02/01/2026One nice piece of detective work for the Christmas morning shutter failure at Lick - staff astronomer Dr. Elinor Gates (with others) figured out exactly what time the shutter fell down. The first major clue: records from the seismometer in the building. There's a sharp red spike just after 3:16 AM. 1111
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 31/12/2025Yesterday's update - contractors and staff (working almost to midnight) got the roof holes patched and the floor protected, though the dome itself is going to have to remain open until we have several days without rain. 0131
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 29/12/2025Pictures from when I was up there over the weekend, protecting things as best we can. 3336
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 29/12/2025You don't really appreciate how big the shutter (and the dome) are until you see them on the ground. 1181
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 29/12/2025Lick updates: We got a crane up there Friday and the winds dropped enough by Saturday to get the shutter off the roof. 46712
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 27/12/2025Mountaintop staff worked heroically all day Christmas to protect the telescope as best they could and remove water and secure and assess the building. The shutter (probably about two tons) also did significant damage to the roof of the historic main building. 1132
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 27/12/2025In not-very-good news, extreme winds (114 mph gusts) on the early morning of the 25th caused significant damage to the 36" Great Refractor at Lick Observatory. Half of the main shutter broke off and landed on the main building. 68530
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 08/12/2025Movie you’ve watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode (no Star Wars or Star Trek, LOTR, Marvel, Disney, or Pixar) 4192
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 04/11/2025This is a pretty darn important election here in California for an odd-numbered year. Get out there! 060
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 29/10/2025...yes you do static.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/... 010
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 24/10/2025This is going to sound corny, but to me, @ucmerced.bsky.social 's vibe was...hopeful. Building something excellent and new for the very best of reasons, to teach the students of California. Also the adorable bobcat is now tied with the UCSC slug for my favorite UC mascot. 020
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 11/08/2025SGL is the most likely one I was thinking of (though to be fair 10km is hard.) See for example arxiv.org/abs/2002.11871 or arxiv.org/abs/2204.13811 150
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 04/05/2025Other highlights include the mandatory chile enchiladas with egg, and a very nice hike up Tortuga Mountain with Eric Nielsen and the students of the exoplanet/young stars group, including excellent corgis. 140
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 04/05/2025Fortunately there's actually a considerable literature on extrasolar plants, for example O'Malley-James & Kaltenegger 2019. 120
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 04/05/2025Back from a nice visit to New Mexico State University. Based on the departmental poster I realized the audience might want something different so I responded accordingly. 1160
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 20/02/2025Meanwhile: we're doing the first full cooldown of the upgraded spectrograph for the Gemini Planet Imager. 1282
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 30/12/2024We got a couple of pounds of fresh mochi from a friends' church that does a large-scale Mochisuki. (Pre-covid we helped out on the assembly line.) 210
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 29/12/2024Bluesky didn't seem to animate the previous GIF so here's a movie version. Kept in this loop forever. I'm pretty sure I am human, but what do I know? 020
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 29/12/2024Researchgate ("The Pinterest of science") seems utterly unwilling to believe I am human and I am peculiarly insulted. 1100
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 25/12/2024These are model Gundams from Bandai. Snap together, decorate with stickers and markers so no painting (at least for me). This one is a super-deformed (chibi) version of the XV-016 Aerial. 110
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 01/12/2024Note that is unknown whether most extrasolar planets are coated with a thin layer of olive oil, so these are not perfect analogs. But promising! I have added the cauliflower boundary to this figure from a great paper by Kielan Hoch, arxiv.org/abs/2212.04557 1302
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 01/12/2024Result: cauliflower heated to temperatures lower than the typical hot jupiter loses 40% of its mass, almost half of its water, and hence a lot of its oxygen. This gives a C/O ratio of 0.35, consistent with the hot jupiters. 4414
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 01/12/2024This is similar to many extrasolar planets. See for example this figure from the excellent Thorngren, @jjfplanet.bsky.social et al arxiv.org/abs/1511.07854 to which I have helpfully added what I hope will be known going forward as the the Macintosh-Marley Cauliflower Boundary. 2601
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 16/11/2024We used the PSDI propagation software to model GPI, and worked with an EUVL-inspired vendor (Precision Asphere) to polish individual mirrors in GPI to < 1 nm RMS. (Measurement here is just from a commercial Zygote) 110
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 16/11/2024We used this technology to characterize optics for GPI, especially the MEMS deformable mirror, and show that we could flatten the DM to <1 nm absolute accuracy, precision, and stability. 110
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 16/11/2024LLNL also developed what was probably the world's most advanced precision interferometer, the lensless phase-shifting diffraction interferometer (PSDI). Led by the brilliant Gary Sommargren, it used a tiny perfect pinhole to make a perfect spherical wavefront, embedded in a superpolished surface 120
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 14/11/2024NSF CV-generation submittal certification is disturbingly specific. 220
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 17/07/2024Since we're doing SL9 anniversary, here's the Keck Observatory sequence of an impact - the fireball (1300 km high!) becomes visible over the edge of Jupiter. Raw IR data with a terrible camera and a small field of view and still amazing. (Imke de Pater, James Graham, Mike Liu, and @plutokiller.com 0102
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 16/06/2024And, finally, the awesome coronagraph(sitting quietly in its box under an extra layer of dust protection because it is that special.) 010
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 16/06/2024The snoot-shield somewhat later as they tested stowing/deploying it. 100
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 15/06/2024The six black round things are reaction wheels - the big gyroscopes that provide torque to change the direction of the telescope. (Three, plus three spares.) I dislike these intensely. (Ask me why!) 120
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 15/06/2024The main spacecraft bus. Full of electronics and propulsion (not yet installed) and all the things that a spacecraft needs that aren't actual telescope bits. 110
Bruce Macintosh @bmacastro.bsky.social · 15/06/2024Avionics panels. I love how much these look like giant printed circuit boards. 110