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Astronomical Delights

@sciencesational.bsky.social
164 followers 165 following 613 posts

The oldest science has evolved to embrace math, physics and chemistry like nothing else, except the universe itself. "La matematica è la lingua con cui Dio ha scritto l'universo" -Galileo

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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Look what's happened to my #orchid in contact with an Opuntia cactus. Its tiny hairs (glochids) that also cling to human skin & irritate it, have wounded the leaf, causing a defence response. The wound triggered a burst of rapid reactive oxygen species(superoxide & H₂O₂) from the epidermal cells.
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
The lunar #analemma: a composite of pictures of the #Moon photographed at the same time every day for the entire lunar month. twanight.org/gallery/luna...
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October... #OctoberSky
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
#mathsky The beauty of MacLaurin series makes all this understandable
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
We now use spectroscopy to obtain a star's temperature, chemical composition, rotation-speed, magnetic field, density, turbulence and line of sight velocity. Spectral classes make up the x axis of HR diagrams which astronomers use to classify stars.
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Chemical spectroscopy allowed astronomy to flourish as much as the telescope. It's rooted in Fraunhofer's 1814's invention of the spectroscope and his systematic study of the sun's absorption lines. www.fraunhofer.de/en/about-fra...
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Ted Williams' .400 season uvachemistry.wordpress.com/2026/09/23/t... Ted Williams' .400 season
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
"Galaxy clusters are the most massive structures in the Universe &exert such a powerful gravitational pull that they warp the spacetime around them and act as cosmic lenses which can magnify, distort&bend the light behind them." When source, large mass & Earth are aligned, we see an Einstein ring.
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
As far as #stamps go, nothing beats those with themes of science or space.
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
From JWST, a dust pillar in the Carina Nebula, ~7500 ly away. Formed by interstellar gas and dust, it's shaped by powerful stellar winds & radiation from neighboring stars like the nearby Eta Carinae stellar system which is more luminous than 5 million suns. science.nasa.gov/image-articl...
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Quite the sunrise this morning. No AI. No filters. As is. Peak colors today, 9 to 16 minutes before #sunrise. But varies with season, latitude and cloud conditions.
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Next year will mark the 300th year after Newton.
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
O₂ is extraordinarily difficult to make &/or keep in the gas phase in interstellar clouds. But in 2011, Herschel's HIFI instrument provided the 1st clear detection of O₂ in interstellar space. There were 3 independent rotational transitions at 487, 774 and 1121 GHz in the Orion star-forming region.
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
In Star Trek's "Galileo Seven"(1967), the shuttlecraft Galileo, under Spock's command, crash-lands on a hostile planet. As the Enterprise races against time to find the shuttle, Spock's strictly logical leadership clashes with the fear and resentment of his crew.
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
In the evening in late winter and early in the morning in late summer, the Pleiades(M45) are visible. They are a sight to behold! They're all B type stars, so have prominent neutral helium lines in their spectra. First guy to view them through a telescope? Galileo... from the Digitized Sky Survey:
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Apophenia* is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. Pareidolia, usually an innocuous form of apophenia, is the visual perception of a form among random signals. An example of the latter is the Moon rabbit.
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
UNESCO: in 2023 there were 1,486 scientific and technology researchers per million inhabitants on Earth. Australian & New Zealand have the highest density, more the 3× the world average; while Sub Saharan Africa, the lowest at only 6% of the mean. www.uis.unesco.org/en/2026-rd-d...
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
The drawing of the Big Dipper asterism is from al-Rahmān Al Sūfi's "Book of Fixed Stars" from 964. The book included Arabic names for stars along with Ptolemy's 48 constellations. It also had subjective rankings of stars' apparent magnitudes.
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
The M class stars include from the list: Betelgeuse, Antares & Gacrux. These are reddish with strong TiO lines. They have cool surfaces(2400-3900K) and can include dwarfs, red giants & supergiants like Betelgeuse.
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
The next most commonly represented in the list are A stars: Sirius, Canopus, Vega, Altair, Adhara, Shaula, Formalhaut, Deneb & Castor. Their surface temperature is 7500 to 10k K & their spectra have the strongest hydrogen Balmer lines, the kind that Bohr explained with his quantized atomic model.
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Among the 25 stars that seem brightest to us are 9 of the spectral B class. They're blue-white; hotter(10000 to 30000K), bigger & more short-lived than our Sun & with prominent neutral helium lines. They're Rigel(7), Achernar(9), Hadar(11), Acrux(13),Spica(16), Mimosa(20) & Regulus(21). #astronomy
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
To the immediate & lower right of the cypress tree is Venus. Computer reconstructions of the sky over Saint-Rémy show Venus in the correct region of the eastern sky during the relevant period. In a letter to Theo, Van Gogh also referred to a bright morning star at the time of the painting.
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
"Newly formed stars are often very active, & in some cases they expel very narrow jets of rapidly moving ionised gas. Its streams then collide with the clouds of gas & dust surrounding new stars at speeds of 100's mi/s. These energetic collisions create Herbig–Haro objects such as HH111."
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
#Einstein
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Representatives of the seven spectral classes. #astronomysky
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
collided with neutral water molecules in the comet's tail.The comet's discoverer, Yugi Hyakutake, did so with a pair of binoculars. He couldn't believe it was a new comet; he had just discovered another 1 the year before. He kept looking for more to die from an aneurysm at the age of 51 in 2001.
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
(1/3) In the the spring of 1996 we saw #Hyakutake. Little did we know that it was one of the closest approaches by a #comet ( 0.1 AU) ever, and that it was the first trip back in 17000 years! There's speculation that collisions with comets gave rise to our oceans.
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
In the #NegroLeagues in the 1930s, there was a great ball player named "Cool Papa Bell". There was a joke about him being so fast that he was hit by his own line drive while sliding into 2nd base. If the line drive- velocity was the typical 100 mph, how fast did Papa Bell run? #baseball #mathsky
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
"The derivative is a rich concept that opens many doors. How unfortunate for many students that the only lasting takeaway is that it turns x³ into 3x². " - David Bressoud,: " #Calculus Reordered" Like the fact that the rate of change of velocity of a falling ball is gravitational acceleration
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
For about a human lifespan, from 1876 to 1951, the largest known prime number was 2¹²⁷-1. It is still the biggest prime to have been discovered without computers. The current largest known #Mersenne prime, 2¹³⁶²⁷⁹⁸⁴¹− 1 was discovered in Oct 2024. (Graphic from David Wells.)
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
#mathsky
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
Google's #Gemini does a great job converting my notes in ink to digital form. Here's the definition and differentiation needed to integrate the LambertW function, and in my replies, the integration itself. The function is useful in evaluating non linear equations. #mathsky
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
Decades of observations from a research institute in Murmansk, Russia reveal that the Barents Sea has warmed significantly, with reduced sea-ice cover and northward shifts in the ranges of many fish and plankton species. #climatechange Never heard of Murmansk? Here's more...
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Reference for volatile organic compounds of lychees: www.mdpi.com/2311-7524/8/...
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Methylene cyclopropyl acetic acid (MCPA) is a toxic compound found in #lychee seeds. It can interfere with key enzymes and cause hypoglycemia. The fruits themselves,when ripe, are free of the compound, delicious & a source of 556 VOCs. 100g of lychees have ~ 80% of vitamin C that you need in a day.
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
Poppies from our garden. (Papaver rhoeas, also known as Flanders poppy) . It does not produce opium, but its flowers are a source of rhoeadine, a different alkaloid that has been been studied for its potential use in the treatment of morphine dependence. #botany #flowers
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
Backyard cardinal taking off from the top of the shed #birdwatching
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
And my sledge hammer way of deriving the sum of cubes formula using calculus.
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
i^i and cos(i) are real numbers. So is the fourth root of (-1) raised to the square root of -1. Lots of interesting math is involved in showing why. #mathsky
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
#Mathsky Ramanujan's 32 digit approximation to π: ln(640320³+744)/√163. Comes from theory of complex multiplication &properties of 163, 1 of 9 Heegner numbers. The value is close to an integer because of deep identities involving the modular j-invariant. The number is exactly the nearest integer to
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
If you start at any value, a, other than zero and integrate to infinity, the integral will converge, as shown by the comparison test. Can you find the solution? In so doing, you'll have to handle two gems: the Dirichlet integral and Si(x) #Mathsky
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
(3/3) This is akin to the way hemoglobin, our oxygen carrier, makes our blood red. The protein part (globin) is produced by the plant, while the heme group is synthesized by the bacteria, making #leghemoglobin a product of their close symbiotic (specifically, mutualistic) relationship.
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Astronomical Delights @sciencesational.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
(1/3)Leghemoglobin in soy is a heme-containing protein responsible for carrying oxygen. It delivers the oxidizer where it's needed. Rhizobium bacteria reside in their roots, where they convert nitrogen from the air to usable ammonium. Both they&plant cells need O₂ for respiration to produce ATP,
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