iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Justin Bartel

Dr. SkySkull @drskyskull.bsky.social · 14h

Here’s the Model 118 ConvAirCar from 1947. “World’s first flying car” is bullshit.

Literally a car with fixed wings in flight

Justin Bartel @cephalopernicus.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Is the image acquisition order and/or viewing geometry known? I could see it being maybe a quarter of a rotation of the asteroid?

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Justin Bartel @cephalopernicus.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

First time I've seen these other angles of Kamo'oalewa #BetterKnowAnAsteroid

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Robert "The Bobby Yaga" McNees @mcnees.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Happy “Evidence that there are things outside the Milky Way” Day to all who celebrate. 🧪 🔭

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Elizabeth Anne, PhD @lacksauthority.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

never the wrong time for this classic

Screenshot of a tweet by @RobbtKraft reading “scientist: "does everyone here know what Watson and Crick discovered?"
me from back of room: "Rosalind Franklin's notes"”

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Mike Drucker @mikedrucker.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

AI COMPANIES: “People who don’t use AI agents just aren’t aware of the vast power they possess to do anything.” NORMAL PEOPLE: “Wow, okay, wow. Sounds great. What can they do? Give me your top example.” AI COMPANIES: “The hardest task of all: Checking you into a flight!”

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Justin Walsh @jstpwalsh.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Shane Ross at Virginia Tech created a simulation of what 500k orbital data centers, as proposed by SpaceX, would look like from your home latitude sdross0.github.io/orbital-data...

sdross0.github.io

What would orbital data centers look like from your sky?

500,000 satellites from SpaceX's FCC filing, two published brightness models and the real stars, for any latitude, date and time. Computed in your browser.

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ESA Space Science @science.esa.int · 30/09/2026

Inspector Smile is ready for science! 🫡 This is Smile’s first ultraviolet view showing an auroral substorm. With the ultraviolet camera now operational, Smile becomes the first spacecraft since 2008 to capture the full ring of northern lights around the north pole in ultraviolet light. 🔭 🧪 ☀️

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Justin Bartel @cephalopernicus.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Does my computer get sad when I win a game of Minesweeper?

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Justin Bartel @cephalopernicus.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Nothing says 'golden era of science' (or whatever the tagline is) like throwing world-class equipment in the trash.

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Justin Bartel @cephalopernicus.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Uh, Jupiter liked the dinosaurs, so maybe this should be JUICE's mascot

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Raysident Evil @sireviscerate.myatproto.social · 07/09/2026

It was missing something.

I've added a Spaceballs helmet to the proposed Space Force uniform

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Space Telescope Science Institute @stsci.edu · 30/08/2026

Are you awake? 🥱 NASA Live coverage of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launch starts at 6:20 a.m.! Launch is scheduled for 7:26 a.m. You have time to make coffee. ☕ #NASARoman 🔭 🚀

nasa.gov

NASA Live - NASA

NASA live: Follow live television broadcasts on NASA+, the agency's streaming service, and NASA's social media channels with this schedule of upcoming live events including news briefings, launches and landings.

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Justin Bartel @cephalopernicus.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Looks like the next opportunity would be Monday at 7:22 a.m. ET, but haven't found a longer list of launch windows yet www.spacex.com/launches/roman

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Justin Bartel @cephalopernicus.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

First day off in a week, and I guess I'll keep my alarm set.

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Justin Bartel @cephalopernicus.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Second, maybe I misheard bc I was cooking dinner, but there was something about JWST bursting onto the scene with 5 great images, and then only releasing 5 since? Friends, rest assured there are hundreds of pretty PR images, and many more processed by scientists and enthusiasts. Behold the cosmos!

esawebb.org

Images

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Justin Bartel @cephalopernicus.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

If you have a mental picture of the Sun simply doing normal star things, you're ready to imagine all the possibilities that exoplanets, exomoons, exoasteroids, exocomets (and by extension interstellar objects), etc. have to offer. This is better, I think, to make us part of the wider universe

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Justin Bartel @cephalopernicus.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Enjoyed the Saturn part of this, but two other things jumped out: @hankgreen.bsky.social says, 'important thing about the Sun isn't that it's a star, it's that Sun is a system w/ many objects' We can go further. The Sun is a star & the most important thing about *stars* is that they are systems!

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Micah @rincewind.run · 26/08/2026

there are going to be many remembrances of Tim Curry today for his brilliant work in Rocky Horror and Clue and so much more, but to me this ridiculous bit from Red Alert sums up everything that made him great you never knew what you were going to get with him, but whatever it was would be brilliant

static.klipy.com

Tim Curry: Uncorrupted Space

Alt: Tim Curry's Space gif from Red Alert

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Justin Bartel @cephalopernicus.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

A certain group of professionals has chalked up a PR win because so many people think Pluto was slighted. But those same members of public can't name any other dwarf planets, so all-in-all, the situation seems like a net loss for humanity.

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Justin Bartel @cephalopernicus.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

The IAU's classification of Pluto has held an undue level of public attention in the last two decades, and it's created a barrier for sharing our ever-evolving picture of the solar system with general audiences.

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Justin Bartel @cephalopernicus.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

There have been larger shifts in the field in the last four centuries—new planets, other galaxies, big bang cosmology, etc.—and because I wasn't alive for those, maybe I don't appreciate the resistance those ideas faced. In a more contemporary case, are there big exoplanet deniers out there?

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Justin Bartel @cephalopernicus.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Ok, ok, that's mildly hyperbolic, but I don't think I'm too far off. We have some Tycho-like zealots clinging to the old maps of the solar system, hyper-focused on maintaining Pluto's historical status rather than fully incorporating all modern data and common sense to their cosmology.

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Justin Bartel @cephalopernicus.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

On this, the 20th anniversary of Pluto's reclassification, a reminder that something can be a non-planet and still be a wildly interesting object. If you continue to call what happened in 2006 a "demotion," you're contributing to the biggest misconception in astronomy education since geocentrism.

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Justin Bartel @cephalopernicus.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Pluto's reclassification was a lateral move at worst. But neat to be there for the vote

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Don Davis @ddavisspaceart.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

During the recent Total Solar Eclipse the South Korean Danuri spacecraft obtained a nice view of Earth from Lunar orbit with the Moons shadow just visible on Earth. Here is their image, with attribution added, my colorized version and the nearly simultaneous EPIC-DSCOVR image used for the color.

This is a reduced version of the photo released today by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute. Earth is seen from Lunar orbit during the recent Total Solar eclipse. The Moon is barely showing shadows behind the sunlit surfaces, and the shadow of the Moon itself is just at the horizon, or perhaps 'Limb' better suits an orbital view. One very wide shadow shows a fuzzy edge on a distant rise. I added the attribution.

This is my version of the Danuri Lunar orbiter photo, with color added. I combined their Earth photo with a color EPIC-DSCOVR image made at about the same time, rotated a little in 3D to better match the Danuri viewing angle for compositing. The sharpness of the B&W original is preserved with the DSCOVR full Earth photo mostly used for the color values. I also prefer this orientation with the foreground Moon at the bottom.

This is the EPIC (Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera) image from the DSCOVR satellite made at close to the same time as the Danuri image, shown in reduced form but otherwise as released.
The exposure is naturally for the sunlit Earth and clouds. The Moon shadow's wide peripheral zone of gradual darkening, the 'penumbra' is where the illumination decreases as more of the Sun is eclipsed. At this time the outermost shadow area was near the Great Lakes, from this perspective a circular zone of that radius thus surrounds the progressively underexposed zone around the Moon shadow. If the exposure were adjusted to define the actual umbra, or zone of totality, the resulting small black dot in the image , about 30 percent the size of the underexposed portion seen here, would be surrounded by the greatly overexposed fully sunlit rest of the world.

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Reposted by Justin Bartel

Dr. Raphael Marschall @spacemarschall.net · 29/07/2026

We are used to seeing weird shapes of small asteroids, but this is next level! look at the shape of 44 Nysa from Minker et al. This is 75 km volume-equivalent diameter object! Also it has a satellite! #planetSci 🧪

Residuals of R-band images of the Nysa system on 2026-
02-15 after processing with the blind deconvolution method of
Appendix A.3. The position of the satellite is marked with a pink
arrow. To improve the S/N, the deconvolution residuals were av-
eraged with a a ±5 frame sliding window. To provide scale, the
primary has been superimposed. An extended video version of
this figure and the same processing for the 2026-03-21 dataset is
available online.

Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.25786

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Justin Bartel @cephalopernicus.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

An SSD Database Query would be one option; it has some predefined orbit classes that can be used (plus an API): ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_q... Minor Planet Center also has a database search, though some subclasses for distant objects aren't predefined: www.minorplanetcenter.net/db_search

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Luke Bones 🦴🦴 @lukemeister.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Further work is urgently needed to constrain the population of lunar baboons.

Photographs of (a) the lunar nearside and (b) an adult male sacred baboon, Papio hamadryas. (c) Irradiance spectrum of moonlight at 57° elevation and 91% full. (d) Median reflectance spectra of forehead hair (n = 6 individuals of each baboon species.

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Justin Bartel @cephalopernicus.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

This is like remaking Star Wars to be historically accurate.

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Justin Bartel @cephalopernicus.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

I stand by my thesis that Jupiter liked the dinosaurs. Maybe the K-Pg impactor was a match for CO chondrites. The map below shows where such objects are found in the asteroid belt- right next to a resonance with Jupiter. The impactor didn't target Earth, it was pushed! #BetterKnowAnAsteroid

seti.org

Meteorites: A Geologic Map of the Asteroid Belt

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CosmicRami 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ @rami.spaceaustralia.com · 10/07/2026

US FCC: “let’s do a consultation on how the community feels about this” Community: “we hate it, don’t do it, it’s real bad, this will impact a lot of people — astronomers, biodiversity, Indigenous communities, more” x 1800 responses FCC: “lol, we don’t care. APPROVED.”

But to expand the technology, Reflect Orbital envisions operating over 50,000 satellites by 2035, effectively surrounding the Earth with a fleet of mirrors. The proposal has faced stiff pushback from environmental groups and astronomers concerned that the satellites will unleash intrusive light pollution. The opposition has been so strong that the FCC received over 1,800 public comments on the application, many of them objecting to Reflect Orbital’s plan for Earendil-1.

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Tony Dunn @tony873004.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Asteroid Torifune was just imaged by Japan's Hayabusa 2. This asteroid is a rubble pile. If you could gently place it in the middle of a parking lot, it might look something like this. 🔭 #astro

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astrafoxen @astrafoxen.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Smallest asteroid ever photographed up close, and WOW I've never seen anything like this before!! No obvious craters and very jagged shape. Just a single, 30-meter-long chunk of solid rock, unlike other asteroid visited by space probe.

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Andrew Jones @andrewjonesspace.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Tianwen-2 had arrived. Here's asteroid Kamo'oalewa seen from 20 km away www.xinhuanet.com/20260706/eb8...

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Colin Warriner @colinelmustard.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

I think this might be one of the most incredible, unsettling and symbolic photos of today’s America I’ve ever seen. I can’t stop looking at it. From Reuters, published on the Guardian website.

Lightning strikes behind the illuminated Washington Monument, as people gather to watch 250th anniversary fireworks.
Photograph: Nathan Howard/Reuters

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slate @pleasebegneiss.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

they are so close to discovering global warming

Maga claims someone with trump derangement syndrome geoengineered dc heatwave

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Justin Bartel @cephalopernicus.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

We do have a few quasi-moons. They may not total 38, but small ones would be hard to see, so we can't rule it out. #BetterKnowAnAsteroid

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McSweeney's @mcsweeneys.net · 01/07/2026

"Every serious legal mind must inevitably face a fundamental choice: Read the Constitution and apply its words as the bedrock laws of the land, or transcend its tired text and interpret the super-secret invisible version that tells you exactly what you want to hear."

buff.ly

The US Constitution Is for Simple Folk Still Burdened by the Belief That Words Have Meaning

“Every serious legal mind must inevitably face a fundamental choice: Read the Constitution and apply its words as the bedrock laws of the land, or transcend ...

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Justin Bartel @cephalopernicus.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Maybe it will happen today. (For the purposes of this post, "it" refers to someone replacing the battery in the smoke detector that's been beeping in the next apartment over for a full week now)

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NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory @rubinobservatory.org · 30/06/2026

The start of a new survey of the Universe? That deserves a new view of the cosmos 🌌 Meet the Ocean of Stars, NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory's newest wide-field image. 🔭🧪 🔗: rubinobservatory.org/gallery/imag...

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cosmos4u.bsky.social @cosmos4u.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

The #Hayabusa2 spacecraft in its extended mission has sighted the #asteroid (98943) #Torifune which it will pass on 5 July: www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp/topics/20260... - see also www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs34... for a recorded press conference.

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SK Winnicki, PhD 🏳️‍⚧️ @skwinnicki.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

Both totally unnecessary and extremely funny that the Guardian has an interactive graphic for you to change the color of the US flag's blue to the color of the Reflecting Pool from 8 to 19 June and counting

Screenshot of the article's graphic, showing color swatches derived from the Earthcam archive, illustration the color of the reflecting pool calibrated against satellite imagery, from 8 June to 19 June 2026. I chose yesterday, 19 June, so it rendered the US American flag with a green hue instead of blue.

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