iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 28/09/2026

Astronomers and software devs: does anyone else think it's time for @asclnet.bsky.social to stop automatically ingesting software without approval by the authors? ASCL was awesome before you could make your own DOI or publish astro software alone. That's not our world anymore! 🔭 #astrocode

As an example, this image shows citations to many unique record identifiers for photutils, an astropy coordinated package. The 2016 ASCL entry did not make the code more citable than it was at the time, and does not now either.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 30/08/2026

Baby photo of our now grown up spacecraft:

Smiling nerd in front of the incomplete Roman Space Telescope at NASA Goddard.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 30/08/2026

I’ve been working at @stsci.edu to give everyone access to data from NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Our treasure chest is open for anyone, anywhere, anytime. And today, the telescope is IN SPACE. 🧪🔭🚀 #astrocode

Brett and a 5 year old watching a Falcon Heavy launch NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from a pier.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 20/07/2026

Couldn’t decide where to post this, but your post made me do it. Today I was a rider of Rohan.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 18/07/2026

Each summer that you experience will be the coolest and most tranquil summer of the rest of your life. Unless maybe you vote like you mean it. 🧪

Four severe weather alerts for Baltimore right now.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 07/07/2026

The COVID-driven decline in trust in the US scientific community is dominated by a political machine and media ecosystem in lockstep. To be hopeful for a minute – if events and administrations have done the damage, maybe they can undo it too. This wasn’t and isn’t inevitable. 🧪

Americans with a “great deal of confidence” in the scientific community were equally represented among Democrats and Republicans until COVID.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 03/07/2026

Our black grill is resting at 160 F / 70 C *before* turning on the gas.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 16/06/2026

I don't know what to do with all these feelings. 🧪🔭🚀

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 08/05/2026

Local art on show at @stsci.edu in Baltimore. Titles and artists in the alt text:

At Your Service (Hubble), by Sonny Lacey

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 13/04/2026

One season's view of the Roman Space Telescope's Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey. Roman will study millions of stars, and how they vary in time. It will reveal tens of thousands of planets throughout the Milky Way, including habitable rocky planets. Plus many unknown unknowns! 🔭🧪🤞 #stellarastro

Red field-of-view outlines for the Roman Space Telescope's Wide Field Imager detectors near the galactic center, shown over a color composite of 2MASS imaging in the near-infrared.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 26/03/2026

Sweet deep dive from Prajwal Niraula, @benrackham.bsky.social et al. on a star near and dear to my heart. #stellarastro 🔭 Evidence from HST, Kepler, TESS, and ground-based spectroscopy all agree: 2024 #JWST observations HAT-P-11 were taken near activity minimum. arxiv.org/abs/2603.24585

Fig 7: Spot filling factors of HAT-P-11 as a function of time. Filling factors derived from rotational variability in Kepler
and TESS light curves (using Equation 2 of Rackham et al. 2019) are compared with values inferred from multi-component
spectral fits to HST G102 and G141 data. Independent chromospheric activity measurements (S-index values from the literature)
are shown on the right axis. The Kepler era exhibits relatively high filling factors with substantial variability, whereas the TESS
epochs indicate a transition to markedly lower spot coverage. Red vertical dotted lines mark the epochs of JWST observations

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 14/03/2026

Melba registers her disappointment with the lack of pie today.

One year old golden retriever looking longingly into the distance.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 04/03/2026

We tied the observed albedos to ranges in chemical abundance for optical absorbers like Na, H2O, TiO and VO with Rayleigh scattering, and compared models with and without condensation or chemical equilibrium. As you might expect, near infinite chemical parameter space makes interpretation tricky.

Fig. 6. Geometric albedo model results, produced by sampling over the
input parameter prior distributions (see Table 5) and using a scaling
factor distribution to move the model away from chemical equilibrium.
The wavelength-dependent albedos were then bandpass-integrated to
produce the expected albedos in the TESS (orange) and CKC (blue)
band. We find similar results to the chemical equilibrium model: temperature and pressure had no effect on the geometric albedo (so they are not shown here), and metallicity is the main driver. Due to increased
parameter space from the relaxation of the chemical equilibrium constraint, the posteriors of TESS and CKC albedos are now wider and
begin to overlap slightly. It is clear that the higher the metallicity, the
lower the geometric albedo.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 04/03/2026

It's Dr. Kathryn Jones' final astro paper! 🧪🔭 Kathryn curated a set of geometric albedos for hot Jupiters from CoRoT, Kepler, CHEOPS (CKC; blue histogram) and TESS (orange histogram), and found that the CKC and TESS albedo distributions are indistinguishable. arxiv.org/abs/2603.02409

Albedo distributions measured with CoRoT, Kepler, and CHEOPS (blue), and with TESS (orange). Hierarchical Bayesian models suggest that both albedo distributions are compatible best described by Rayleigh distributions with consistent parameters in both groups.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 20/10/2025

Q: How old is the star HD 140283, at the center of this image? A: Quite nearly as old as the universe itself. Paper (Lundkvist et al., from last week): arxiv.org/abs/2510.11532 View on the sky: aladin.cds.unistra.fr/AladinLite/?...

HD 140283 viewed in Aladin Lite with Pan-STARRS DR1 imaging. In the field of many stars,HD 140283 is bright, and relatively blue in this colormap.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 17/10/2025

gut check on the fall of the republic:

Airport disclaimer that the airport does not agree with the partisan TSA video that is required to play thanks to dog murderer Kristi Noem

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 14/10/2025

Quite shocked to see that my colleagues left graffiti in the men’s room at BWI.

An expansive back-illuminated mural of JWST images of the Carina Nebula, with stars in blue and dust in gold.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 02/10/2025

One from years passed still lives on my lamp.

A small koala stuffed toy holds onto a thin lamp stand.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 26/09/2025

New feature released in the @jupyter.org Sidecar package: set new sidecar locations relative to other sidecars. Make dashboards/default arrangements of multiple widget outputs! Thanks for the help, @martinrenou.bsky.social. 🧪 Install: pip install sidecar Demo code: gist.github.com/bmorris3/b3e...

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 30/07/2025

Stars don't go quietly into that good night. 🔭🧪 Here, a dying star is spitting itself out in all directions. A companion star nearby may be shaping the points in the splatter. webbtelescope.org/contents/new...

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s view of planetary nebula NGC 6072 in the near-infrared shows a complex scene of multiple outflows expanding out at different angles from a dying star at the center of the scene.

There is one stretching from roughly 11 to 5 o’clock, another from 1 to 7 o’clock, and possibly a third from 12 to 6 o’clock. These outflows push gas toward the equatorial plane, forming a disk that appears to span from 9 to 3 o’clock.

Astronomers suspect there is at least one other star interacting with the material cast off by the central dying star, creating the abnormal appearance of this planetary nebula.

In this image, the red areas represent cool molecular gas, for example, molecular hydrogen.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 29/07/2025

Neat! @flarelord.bsky.social used ground-based photometry to measure the flare temperature on an M7 dwarf. How do you measure temperature without spectroscopy? Trick question! You use the Earth's atmosphere as a prism and watch the star appear to jump across the sky. 🔭🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2507.19584

Figure 1. Panel A: Light curve of the DWF030225.574-
545707.45 flare expressed as g magnitudes in excess of the
quiescent stellar brightness. As noted in Webb et al. (2021),
the lightcurve does not return to pre-flare brightness before
the end of the observing period. Panel B: Raw d∥ measured
on the images, relative to source position at t0. The weighted
average d ∥ of 91 reference stars, weighted by the stars’ astrometric standard deviation across the entire time series,
is shown as a grey line and the standard deviation of their
relative position itself is shown as a filled region. Panel C:
detrended d∥ of the flare star generated by subtracting the
weighted average d∥ of the reference stars shown in Panel B.
A 9-point rolling median is shown by the dashed black line.
Panel D: Rolling median over an 9-point window of the detrended data shown in Panel C, and the time series used for
subsequent analysis in this work.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 25/07/2025

I love Baltimore I do I do. I really do.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 19/07/2025

To the right you’ll see the Roman Space Telescope at NASA Goddard yesterday, and me! 🧪🔭 This is the first space telescope that I’ve supported before its launch. If you can’t tell by my face, I really hope it won’t be the last. Last time I visited this clean room, it held JWST 🥹

Brett standing in front of a window overlooking the big clean room at NASA Goddard, where spacecraft are assembled. The Roman Space Telescope is behind Brett to the right.

The Roman Space Telescope, without its solar array, and with a foil covering for thermal vacuum testing.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 14/07/2025

The brightest star in Scorpius, Antares, is nearing the end of its 15 million year life. It's so large that the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars would be inside the star. 🔭🧪 Pilate et al. published brightness maps of the star, showing gigantic convective cells. arxiv.org/abs/2507.08614

Relative brightness maps of Antares over the course of a year, showing the changing brightness and shapes of convective cells in the stellar photosphere.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 11/07/2025

Until the spectra are available on MAST, here's an interactive visualization app for exploring OWLS spectra and the corresponding MWO HK Project chromospheric activity time series, when available. 🔭🧪 #stellarastro Try it out: github.com/bmorris3/owl... Powered by viz tools from @stsci.edu! ❤️

Interactive visualization tool for time-series spectra from the Olin Wilson Legacy Survey (OWLS).

OWLS is monitoring stellar magnetic activity cycles with optical echelle spectra of FGKM stars with the ARC 3.5 m Telescope at Apache Point Observatory (APO).

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 11/07/2025

Presenting: the Olin Wilson Legacy Survey (OWLS). 🧪🔭 #stellarastro Since 2019, Leslie Hebb, Suzanne Hawley and I have been monitoring spectra of bright northern stars including those monitored by Olin Wilson from ~1965-2000, and planet-hosting stars And we're not done. arxiv.org/abs/2507.07330

Figure 7. Time series of S-indices for five targets with a range of spectral types. The top three panels show data from 1965 to 2024 for
HD 78366 (F dwarf), HD 81809 (G dwarf), and the K-dwarf HD 26965, including historic MWO data (timespan in yellow) and newly obtained
OWLS measurements (timespan in blue). We plot a curve on the G and K stars with three Lomb-Scargle (sinusoidal) terms, with periods
ranging from 8 to 15 years. The OWLS S-indices from 2020-2024 for two M dwarfs GJ 388 B and GJ 494 are shown in the bottom row.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 10/07/2025

Meet the Cat's Paw Nebula, 5,500 light years towards Scorpius, where new stars are forming from the ashes of their ancestors. Observed by JWST with NIRCam. 🔭🧪 webbtelescope.org/contents/med... This is the universe they're trying to take from you.

To celebrate NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s third year of highly productive science, astronomers used the telescope to scratch beyond the surface of the Cat’s Paw Nebula (NGC 6334), a massive, local star-forming region. This area is of great interest to scientists, having been subject to previous study by NASA’s Hubble and retired Spitzer space telescopes, as they seek to understand the multiple steps required for a turbulent molecular cloud to transition to stars.

With its near-infrared capabilities and sharp resolution, the telescope “clawed” back a portion of a singular “toe bean,” revealing a subset of mini toe bean-reminiscent structures composed of gas, dust, and young stars.

Webb’s view reveals a chaotic scene still in development: Massive young stars are carving away at nearby gas and dust, while their bright starlight is producing a bright nebulous glow represented in blue. This is only a chapter in the region’s larger story. The disruptive young stars, with their relatively short lifespans and luminosity, will eventually quench the local star formation process.

The Cat’s Paw Nebula is located approximately 4,000 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 30/06/2025

Seems accurate. Metaphor or otherwise.

Alert on my phone says: “fire truck on fire” nearby.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 22/06/2025

gamma Cas is a naked-eye star 550 light years away, and you've seen it as the middle star in the group of five that makes the "W" shape in Cassiopeia.🔭🧪 It spins *so fast* that it's rugby ball shaped, and coming apart. New observations show that it would look like this: arxiv.org/abs/2506.15027

Synthetic image of the star's shape, which was made with a stellar model that is consistent with the observations. The star is shaped like rugby ball, and it is an asymmetric brightness distribution. The star is white-hot near the pole, to the lower left, and blueish near the equator.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 21/06/2025

The peri peri main sequence is a naturally occurring correlation in color and ripeness of the pepper. Gaia G - RP captures the principle component. Higher ripeness resolution is obtained in flavor space, though human detectors saturate well below the bottom of the sequence. 🧪🔭

A line of peri peri peppers from ripe, dark red on the left, to deep green on the right.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 14/06/2025

They’re good time series, Bront.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 14/06/2025

Running in Druid Hill Park, or as @benjaminpope.bsky.social might call it, the Baltimore solar archive. 🔭

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 10/06/2025

My top aspiration for my open source software is that someone could use it to successfully solve hard problems in astronomy without needing to contact me at all. This work by Mayuko Mori et al. was a joyful read even *before* seeing which tool they used. 🥹🔭🧪 Enjoy: arxiv.org/abs/2506.06445

Figure 3. Observed transit light curves of TOI-3884b (top to bottom: three transits observed with MuSCAT3 or MuSCAT4; left to right: g-, r-, i-, and z-band) and the corresponding best-fit models (black lines). The error bars in the datapoints are scaled to make reduced χ2 values equal to 1. To the right of each light curve, the spot distribution on the stellar surface at the corresponding epoch is shown, as modeled with fleck. The x mark in the figure shows the location of the stellar pole, the dotted lines show the stellar equator, and the regions inside dashed lines indicate the transit chord.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 29/05/2025

Watch the solar plasma curve along magnetic field lines like iron filings near a bar magnet. #stellarastro 🧪🔭 This work was funded in part by NSF.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 28/05/2025

<whine 🔭> NASA ADS has 1,473 results containing "in the era of JWST" in the title, abstract, or full text. I think that's quite enough. Can we please, as a community, remember that there are other interesting and meaningful ways to say "now"? </whine 🔭>

NASA ADS can find 1,473 articles containing "in the era of JWST" in the title, abstract, or full text. And I say that's enough.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 19/05/2025

Pope Leo, did you watch Game of Thrones? Just wondering.

The High Sparrow prepares to announce Margery’s sentence in Game of Thrones.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 07/05/2025

This is the globular cluster M15, imaged by Hubble. It's a great target for binoculars or backyard telescopes, in the constellation Pegasus. Jiaqi Ying et al. measured M15's age with 3% precision. This group of stars formed *immediately* after the Universe did. arxiv.org/abs/2505.02969 🔭🧪 #stars

This cluster of stars is known as Messier 15, and is located some 35,000 light-years away in the constellation of Pegasus (The Winged Horse). It is one of the oldest globular clusters known, with an age of around 12 billion years. This new image is made up of observations from Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys in the ultraviolet, infrared, and optical parts of the spectrum. (NASA, ESA)

Figure 1. Comparing two theoretical isochrones we constructed with different ages, MC parameters, distance, and reddening. The observational data for M15 is plotted in the background, with photometric uncertainty estimated from the AS test plotted on the right.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 18/04/2025

Did you know that the president's budget request in FY2019 asked for a -5% cut to NASA Science, but Congress passed an +11% increase into law instead? Congress writes the laws, Congress passes the budget, Congress ought to work for you. Tell them your priorities: bit.ly/approps-requ... 🧪🔭

In fiscal year 2019, the President asked for a -5% cut to NASA Science, but Congress passed an +11% increase into law instead.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 17/04/2025

Let's not forget, this isn't the first time the "humble professor" has made unsubstantiated claims about this planet. www.joe.co.uk/news/cambrid...

"In an interview with LBC‘s Tom Swarbrick, the academic revealed that the chances of there being life on the faraway planet are at ’50/50’."

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 17/04/2025

Unfortunately, this is clear case of malpractice. www.thetimes.com/uk/science/a...

Dr Nikku Madhusudhan of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, who led the study, said of the findings: “Given everything we know about this planet, a hycean world with an ocean that is teeming with life is the scenario that best fits the data we have.”

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 16/04/2025

Maryland voters: join me on the @aas.org Zoom on Friday at noon. I'll give a short summary of the congressional appropriations process, and I'll walk you through making your own request for funding for NASA, NSF, and DOE Office of Science. 🧪🔭 Zoom at noon on Friday, April 18: bit.ly/3Y1cJq2

AAS Action for Maryland Voters
Let's meet to submit Congressional Appropriations Requests for Senators Van Hollen and Alsobrooks. Join on Zoom on Friday, April 18
at noon Eastern at https://bit.ly/3Y1cJq2.

We will show you how to request funds for NASA, NSF, and DOE Office of Science. We will walk you through the process to submit an Appropriations Request to fund agencies that matter to you.
Attendees from other states welcome!

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 16/04/2025

Couldn't think of a beta title. 👏

"A ν look at the Sun: Probing the conditions of the solar core using 8B neutrinos," submission to arXiv by Melanie A. Zaidel and John F. Beacom.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 11/04/2025

"What does NASA do for us?" You might think NASA only benefits Americans in Florida or Texas. You'd be wrong. 🔭🧪 www.nasa.gov/fy-2023-econ...

33,000 jobs in the state of Maryland are supported by NASA.

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 11/04/2025

The president's budget request seeks to strangle astronomy in the US. The president's hit job specifically seeks to murder the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope – a revolutionary facility that is fully assembled, on budget, and nearly ready to launch. 🧪🔭 arstechnica.com/space/2025/0...

"Although the budget would continue support for ongoing missions such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, it would kill the much-anticipated Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, an observatory seen as on par with those two world-class instruments that is already fully assembled and on budget for a launch in two years."

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 08/04/2025

Rejected first-draft name for the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes at @spacetelescope.bsky.social? 🧪🔭

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 02/04/2025

Today I visited my senators and some of my colleagues’ reps to advocate for basic science with the @aas.org Congressional Visit Day. I spent my whole voice today. (aside: Booker, how’d you do that last night?) What are you going to do tomorrow? 🧪🔭

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Brett Morris @brettmorr.is · 24/02/2025

This is a recent revival of a hack project originally started at .Astronomy in Cape Town in 2017. Of all my repos, this has the weirdest code frequency now. 🔭

Histogram of contributions to whoseline from 2017 to 2025, showing zero activity for seven years.

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