iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

After one review panel, when other members had been drinking, we fantasized giving each panelist one (unit of time on facility), combining for joint programs, enriching approved ones.... Had to be something nobody proposed.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Must be pure coincidence that both your examples were trombonists. Related, I just saw a tour schedule for Chicago and see that James Pankow is still in the band after FIFTY YEARS.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Our family situation is such that we occasionally really need to get calls at 3 or 4:30. Just not spam. If I got one saying Swedish Academy, there are a few colleagues I would suspect.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Phone rang at 0452 local time on Sunday morning. Too groggy to see the phone said "spam risk", I picked up and it purported to tell me of a problem with a FedEx delivery address. Even for a legitimate delivery call that seems like an unlikely call time. Life's better with, umm, something or other...

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Reposted by Bill Keel

Jeremy Bailin @astrobailin.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Happening tonight, hope to see y'all there!

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

OK, some of those might be people doing calibration or instrument monitoring, which gets a pass in this context. (Nervously checks my 1990s HST proposal lists)

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

We are headed toward a world where retired engineers will be most of the people analyzing astronomical data.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Except for the havoc it would play with how (US) universities evaluate their faculty, and how they fund their research... Urk. I'm barely co-I on 3 and PI on none, and they have my email, so they will be coming for me when it's review time. [2/2]

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

There are a few people who have vocally advocated a kind of triage+dice - do the things all the reviewers like, and don't do the few with conceptual flaws - but randomly pull from the vast middle ground. This feels wrong, but I can't honestly say it's worse than the current random human input.[1/2]

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Lemme see whether tagging @dragoncon.org will get this on the Con feed. One might think I'd long ago figured out doing BlueSky feeds, but one would be wrong. #dragoncon

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

In case you missed it at the Con - a processed collection of images we took in front of an audience (sometimes based on requests) at this year's Live Astronomy in Space Track. The remotely-operated telescopes are at observatories in Chile and the Canary Islands. Check us out in 2027! #dragoncon

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Reposted by Bill Keel

Kym @ The Evening Sky Map @skymaps.com · 29/09/2026

💫 The October 2026 edition of The Evening Sky Map (PDF) is available for download at skymaps.com/tesm/. It features easy-to-use sky maps for the northern & southern hemispheres, and equatorial regions. Enjoy exploring the night sky! 🔭 #stargazing #space #nightsky

The Evening Sky Map is a circular all-sky star chart showing constellations, the Milky Way, planets, horizon directions and deep-sky objects depicted by symbols with an accompanying legend, plus a left-column sky calendar listing lunar and planetary events and viewing times.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

A retired engineer came to my office multiple times about how the southern sky was a reflection of the northern but couldn't tell me what it was reflecting from. (He had also invented perpetual motion, with quite precise blueprints).

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Yes, they are so close that I could see ESTEC from my office window as a Leiden postdoc.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I looked up the values for a presentation early this month and found ~1.27 m^2 deg^2.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

They may tell you that parenting starts as a blue-collar occupation and morphs over time into white-collar. But there's a secret third stage where it's special ops.

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Reposted by Bill Keel

John F Wu @jwuphysics.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Built a thing that #aatrosky may enjoy: galaxy-manifold.github.io

The galaxy SFR - stellar mass sequence shown on a phone screen, with galaxy image cutouts as well as lines showing the relation for galaxies based on subselections in Dn4000 break strength. All from the web app.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

There was a time when I thought it was cruel to have toddlers on a leash and harness. This judgmental attitude lasted until about 5 seconds after we first took a toddler into an airport. They are really fast.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I can imagine how quickly Half65 would have jumped in.

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overlapzoo.bsky.social @overlapzoo.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I'm excited to announce the official launch of Overlap Zoo, a citizen science project supported by @nasa and in collaboration with the @galaxyzoo.org team. Please help us classify and categorize these amazing cosmic coincidences! www.zooniverse.org/projects/tbu...

zooniverse.org

Overlap Zoo | Zooniverse - People-powered research

Classify overlapping galaxies from the DESI Legacy Imaging Survey

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Each group wants to hold system administration to their particular view of its function. For universities - job preparation, social acculturation, knowledge/culture repositories and research/creativity centers, spectator athletics, tech transfer. Slightest hint of fostering reasoning skills. [3/3]

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Public universities in the US share a structural framework with the criminal justice system. Stakeholders and wannabe stakeholders do not share a common goal for the system, often holding directly conflicting views. They grudgingly agree to a certain level of public funding. [2/n]

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

An expedition to The Former Platform reveals lost of Academia is Rotting and Deserves It discourse, often associated with very individual grievances and implicit views of its role. So this seems like the time to repeat what I realized when Younger Son took his first Criminal Justice course: [1/n]

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

(Pedantry alert) Well, late July 2007 - hence "20th year". I may plan something celebratory for the 20th anniversary of Hanny van Arkel's post a few weeks later (aside from renewing my license plate 4WERP, I mean).

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I just got email inviting me to a luncheon for retirees at the university (in another state) Younger Son graduated from a decade ago. I remain confused.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Every time TMP is on cable, I record it, then watch it at night with the lights out and play the flyaround scene twice just to counterbalance the haters. It had been so long since we had Star Trek, and there it was.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Almost 1st thing done in Live Astronomy during @dragoncon.org last Friday night - from SARA 1m Kapteyn telescope at La Palma, series of 30s exposures of Nancy Grace Roman space telescope transiting the faint galaxy KOS 222659.3-215011 in Aquarius. (Range 636,000 km)

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

In honor of the 60th anniversary of the US premier of The Original Series - here's a relevant bit of nebulosity in the middle of NGC 6334, the Catspaw Nebula in Scorpius (in H-alpha, from the SARA Remote 60-cm telescope on Cerro Tololo). Boldly go!

Part of the Catspaw Nebula in Scorpius, cropped to show a bright section shaped like the Federation emblem in Star Trek.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

A comment from a panel during the virtual ASP meeting a couple of weeks back was that it turns out to have been a problem for cross-referencing data that, years ago, the Rubin and Roman teams both decided to go with cloud data hosting and computing, but selected different providers.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

The highlight of my @dragoncon.org experience this year? After possible schedule confusion, I got to be the bad guy chasing the game-design billionarie who's been to orbit off the stage so we could start the 11:30 p.m. Live Astronomy event in Space Track. Maybe that should go on my CV.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I once realized I was attending a panel downstairs at the Hyatt in the same room where I'd once given a press conference at one of the AAS meetings (combining HST, VLA, Chandra, and KPNO data). You're probably about to tell me that was before your time. AAS meeting is sooo much smaller.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Server at Mellow Mushroom saw us paging through the printed program and dropped by a couple of their badge ribbons.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

(Consults JPL Horizons to see about possible optical imaging of Roman). Wow, it passes the lunar distance late tomorrow afternoon for North American time zones. Currently kind of toward Fomalhaut and trucking right along.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

AIUI, Swift will go out in a blaze of science, giving up low-drag attitude to resume observing targets of opportunity. All hail.

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Kym @ The Evening Sky Map @skymaps.com · 28/08/2026

💫 The September 2026 edition of The Evening Sky Map (PDF) is now available for download at skymaps.com/tesm/. It features easy-to-use sky maps for the northern & southern hemispheres and equatorial regions. Enjoy exploring the night sky! 🔭 #stargazing #space #nightsky

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I just arrived at my cousin's place in Melbourne for the occasion. (She is another Nancy born in Nashviile so is pretty amused).

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

The shade of Olaf Stapledon enters the chat before anyone even has time to mention Stephen Baxter.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Dear God. Out of the blue.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

AIUI Celestron did this to train an AI routine for optional processing of Origin smart-scope stacks, training using long exposures with an identical optical system, and to my jaundiced eye, that does pretty much what you'd want it to do. OTOH if the information is not there it's not there (YMMV).

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Ancient lore: Unix cat command would gleefuly overwrite one of the input files in, say, cat a b > a (which seems like a plausible way to append the contents of b, right?) Keeper of the Backups at Kitt Peak circa 1985 said it was almost the only reason she ever had to restore a file for someone.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

(Old enough to remember when our campus directory had full appropriate forms of address, honorific plus name, for spouses of faculty and administration, presumably for Proper Written Invitations) .

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

My sole time sending in a popular article in another language had the editor tell me it all worked once he slammed the pile of words with a plank to reorder them.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Finally finished this Messier gallery with 15-cm Celestron Origin smart scope (images autostacked in the app, some further tweaked for contrast). Exposures 5 minutes (open star clusters) to 90 minutes (galaxies), most from light-polluted suburbia. It's so cool. 🔭 #astro

Gallery of color images of the 110 Messier-catalog galaxies, nebula, and star clusters.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

I will say that my performance in song flute in 4th grade, and what that said about finger dexterity, was directly responsible for my subsequent decades as a trombonist.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

This meeting could have been a tablet.

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Even if those specific data sets were never published, the originator is identified right there in the archive or the FITS header. (Not subskeeting anyone - no, wait, maybe I am.)

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

In the late 1970s it was an event for NRAO summer students to watch 16mm film of what happened when they first tried to hoist the 140-foot dish structure onto the largest equatorial mount ever built, ignoring how much capacity some contractors said they would need. www.youtube.com/watch?v=9idO...

youtube.com

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Bill Keel @ngc3314.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

<Gasp> So I may not need to keep that vintage-2008 MacBook around just to occasionally turn on for the ellipse-fitting tasks?

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