iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

Indeed 🙂 bsky.app/profile/mark...

Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

Thanks, Markus – as you may have realised, I'm very rarely here on Bluesky, but that's good to know. Mastodon won't let you do so by default, I think.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

Roughly, at least, I get a sub-latitude of -2.8º, a sub-longitude of -13.9º, and a distance (from the surface of Earth, I think) of ~10,000km. Hard to be more precise than that given the granularity of Celestia's response to my mouse. Oh, at 00:27:39 UTC.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

Oh, & the time I ended up at was 00:30 UTC – I've since checked the EXIF information in the Artemis II image & it was taken at 00:27:39, presumably also UTC. Not bad 🤷‍♂️

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

Sorry – I forgot to add ALT TEXT to that image & don't know how to edit Bluesky posts. A screenshot from the Celestia app, with Earth in the middle and stars and constellations around it – it matches the orientation of the Artemis II shot quite well. Venus is seen at lower-right.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

Two planets for the price of one 🙂👍 Playing around in Celestia, I was able to identify the approximate time & orientation of that #Artemis II shot of Earth's nightside. Revealing that the bright object at lower-right is Venus. Thanks to @Nina_cried@mastodonapp.uk for suggesting that I check 🙇‍♂️

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

Ha – I felt sure that you'd have a professional interest in this, Jonathan 🙂👍

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

When I first saw the image I thought "ugh – that's noisy". Then I looked more closely & saw all the faint stuff – the light levels are 400,000 lower than they would be under sunlight, after all, making this very impressive. Surprising then that NASA didn't mention it in their social media posts 🤷‍♂️

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

You'll have seen this – Earth from #Artemis II en-route to the Moon. But look again – it's Earth's *nightside*, lit by the near-full Moon, not the Sun 🌕️ The aurorae, airglow, stars, & city lights in Europe, Africa, & the Americas give the game away. Cool. NASA/Reid Wiseman #Space #Photography

A picture of the Earth from space illuminated by the full Moon – it looks like daylight, but this is the night side of the planet, not the day side. There are city lights on the continents and a green aurora towards the north and south poles, plus a faint rim of upper atmosphere airglow as well. You can also see a faint dark rim of the Artemis II window frame and the zodiacal light (probably). North is at lower-left and you can see North Africa, then Spain and Portugal on that side. You can see South America and North America on the right side.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

The SW channel data were pretty poorly handled by the pipeline – we're working on custom processing to significantly improve the sky matching & 1/f noise, as well as saturation issues, especially with RAFGL5232. The S/N is low in several channels too, so we have work to do to get the science done.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

Yeah, there are a few jets and outflows in the field, although not as many as we might have expected, given the dense molecular clouds & protostars. But then again, Sh 2-305 is pretty distant, so such things become harder to see.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

Interesting – the people I interact with on Mastodon are generally lovely, apart from the odd person who squawks at me for not Content Warning spider pictures 🙄 But I agree, AstroTwitter was great & there are many people I miss from those days, in part because I’m very rarely here, perhaps.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

I have to admit that I've never understood the objections to Mastodon – for me, it has been the perfect replacement for The Other Place, & comes with many advantages, not least no algorithmic timeline or undesired timeline intruders. Plus it can't be bought, a key lesson learned.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

Thanks, Thomas – I've played with other colour combinations, but some of the SW data have a lot of 1/f noise & other banding straight out of the pipeline which we're working our way through fixing, & once that's done, we should have more colour combination options.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

BTW, how on earth does anyone manage here on Bluesky with such a tight limit on characters in a post?! Sure, I know I tend to be rather ill-disciplined when it comes to editing down social media posts & email, but still ... 😬 That said, I'm not really here anyway, so bye again 👋

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

This is a reduced version of the original data & only includes 3 (F182M, F300M, F360M) of the 8 NIRCam filters we have. The short-wavelength data are pretty noisy & are taking a lot of work both to get good photometry for the stars, but also prettier pictures spanning a wider wavelength range.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

/cc @thocarp.bsky.social @yuvharpaz.bsky.social @melina-iras07572.bsky.social Aloha folks – just to let you know that these data go public tomorrow, but we're still working on them, as there tricky issues with saturation, banding, noise, etc. Plese be sure to tag me if you also make & post images 🙇‍♂️

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

Sneak preview 👀 More of our #JWST data are going public tomorrow, for the galactic star-forming region Sharpless 305 & nearby massive protostar RAFGL5232. Work in progress, as the data are rather problematic 😬 But as others will be quick to post images, here's our snapshot first 😉 #Astronomy

$A colourful field of stars sprinkled across purple ionised gas and redder dust. The main cluster of stars is seen in a cavity to the upper right, while a very bright source surrounded by more gas and dust is seen in the lower left corner, with the characteristic six bright spikes due to diffraction in the optics of JWST. With a credit line in the lower-left corner that reads "Sharpless 305 & RAFGL5232 with JWST NIRCam / Credit: Mark McCaughrean, MPIA / NASA, ESA, CSA"$

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

Yes, I believe the working assumption is that they're proplyds, although the tails are a fair bit more ragged than those in Orion. Mike Kuhn et al. are close to submitting their paper & some of the same folk (Tyger Peake, Tom Haworth at QMUL) are working on the Rosette data with us.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Looks more like an interacting galaxy pair to me, given the asymmetry, the central peaks, & the extended emission on one side. But if Eric reckons that the literature matches an edge-on Class II disk, well, could be. We're working on the data presently.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Yep, we're working on it. It shares some characteristics with Orion-style ionised proplyds, but is very different in other ways. It's a known source, discovered with Spitzer & studied by Balog et al. But the WTF x-ray detection is spurious – careful checking of those data make that clear.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

My gut feeling purely based on the morphology is that it's a pair of galaxies, not least given the extended nebulosity on one side & the two knots / nuclei. But I don't know how readily the SED could be confused with an edge-on Class II system. We're working on the data so will get back to it.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

And ironically, the same agency is perfectly happy to publish the results of my image processing for missions like Rosetta, BepiColombo, JUICE, Gaia, & more – this is a JWST-specific policy. I'd best not say more here, but I suspect you get my drift.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

So I'm not about to turn over my hard-won individual filter mosaics for someone else to further process & composite in the name of "quality control". Ultimately, it just means nugatory work & fewer official image releases, which serves no-one well. Certainly not the agency I worked for for 15 yrs.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

But I've been making colour composites from IR data for 40 years. It's one of the reasons I got involved with JWST in the first place & I'll take the quality of my images against anything "official" from JWST any day. Plus my HH288 colour scheme closely matches other HH object releases.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

Well that exposes a raw nerve. Without naming names, let's just say that those agencies running JWST outreach refuse to publish any images made by anyone other than their own graphics people. I understand the need for quality control, but it's also clearly about policing the aesthetics.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

Thanks, Thomas – I'd appreciate that. I know that Bluesky doesn't offer much space (another reason I'm never here, preferring Mastodon's generosity & algorithmic purity), but I think it's reasonable to expect proper credit wherever images are posted.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

It's also a pity, because I'm often impressed by the work such folk do, especially @geckzilla.bsky.social, for example. And when I asked her & others if I could use some of their work in my book, alongside ESA, NASA, ESO etc., the credits spread over 6.5 full pages. Again, it's not hard to do.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

I'm not sure why "status" would make me immune from wanting to receive credit for the work I've done, both in winning the time for these observations & designing them. It's not hard to do (as you have shown), but some social media image processors seem to think it's irrelevant. Which I hate.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

Bluntly, this is something I absolutely hate about some of the archive hounds. Again, I'm fine with the data being used, of course, but it really, really comes over as lazy & almost dishonest not to give appropriate credit. It's not hard to find the info. But hey, that's social media for you ...

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

Yeah, as if they proposed the observations 🙄 I mean, of course the data should go public, but just how hard is it for people to acknowledge those who competitively won the time & painstakingly designed the observation strategy.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

Hi, Thomas – PI of those observations here. Could you please acknowledge the people who successfully proposed for these JWST data to be taken & who designed the observations? FWIW, here's my take on the same dataset, which came with a lot of heavy-lifting. bsky.app/profile/mark... flic.kr/p/2rTPMvp

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

And while yes, the data should be in the public domain after the proprietary period expires, it's important that the work of the scientists who proposed, won, & defined the observations be fully credited (as you do). Receiving recognition for work done is the sine qua non of a scientist's career.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

Hmm, I see your point, but ... Anyway, my frustration isn't so much with the folk who make images from archival data, as with a large space agency who refused to release my image as is, saying they would only do so if I gave them my processed b/w slices for them to impose their aesthetics on 🙄

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

Only very occasionally, Yuval; thanks. I hope everyone will look at both images & realise quite how much work is involved in removing all of NIRCam's artefacts, but of course, your automated version gets a bazillion more likes than mine. I don't know why I bother sometimes – it's so dispiriting.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

Hello folks – it's been a while 👋 Just popped in to show off my new #JWST NIRCam image of a young protostellar jet in Cassiopeia, HH288, aka The Dragon Jet 🐉 If you like what you see, there's much more info & a movie over on Mastodon: mastodon.social/@markmccaugh... and Flickr: flic.kr/p/2rTPMvp

n image of a young protostellar outflow called HH288 in the constellation of Cassiopeia, as seen with JWST. Much of the background is dark black and blue, with many stars sprinkled across with different colours and brightnesses, many showing the classic eight-pointed shape that comes from the JWST optics. The Dragon Jet itself is a swath of red, orange, and yellow emission spread horizontally across the image, with at least two crossing flows. The main flow resembles a Chinese dragon, hence the name. The presence of several protostellar outflows associated with The Dragon and also in the separate dense core below it, The Dragon's Egg, suggests that this is an interesting place to study young outflows from protostars spanning a range of masses.

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Mark McCaughrean @markmccaughrean.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

Aloha again 🤙 Materialising briefly to let you know my book, "111 Places in Space That You Should Not Miss", published by Emons Verlag, is out now in Europe & the UK, & the US in September 🔭🚀🛰️🪐☄️✨ 10% discount at uk.bookshop.org/p/books/111-... with code "lovebookshops" 📚 100% Tigger approved 😽

A picture of our gold and brown bengal cat standing next to a copy of a book with a spacey cover and a house plant, on one of our balconies with red tiles.

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