iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

M 27, the Dumbbell Nebula, a planetary nebula in the constellation of Vulpecula. It is remarkable among planetary nebula due to the size of the central white dwarf, which is almost 6 Earth-radii across. 🔭

A bright blue bubble of material with a faint shell of pink around the edges, sitting in a dense starfield with many blue, yellow, white, and orange stars.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I have so many plans for both scientific observations and astrophotography this winter, so long as the weather co-operates! Can't wait for 11-12 hour nights! I'm gonna need more disk space...

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

He has more empathy towards an inanimate, unthinking piece of software than he does his own flesh-and-blood daughter.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Devices need to go back to being big and chonky with lots of buttons, dials, and switches

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Amazing to think this thing will be flying through the skies of Titan in a little less than a decade!

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I thought it was an explicit design goal for amethyst meant to encourage players to build infrastructure around geodes to farm them? Making them silk touchable would remove that gameplay.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Just a simple filter-mounted diffraction grating called a StarAnalyzer. It's pretty nifty, although limited, but it's a great tool to learn the basics of spectroscopy. rspec-astro.com/star-analyser/

rspec-astro.com

The Star Analyser SA-100 and SA-200 - RSpec / Real-time Spectroscopy

The Star Analyser 100 grating screws onto your camera nose or filter wheel

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

On 09/01, a new supernova was found in the galaxy NGC 7331, so last night I tried to image it and record a spectrum. It's about mag 12 right now. The spectrum shows the silicon absorption of a type 1a supernova. From this I got an expansion velocity of about -9200 km/s (3% the speed of light). 🔭🧪☄️

An image of a spiral galaxy seen at an oblique angle, with many foreground stars. To the left, several smaller yellowish-gold galaxies form a small arc. Near the core of this galaxy is a bright blue-white star, which is actually a supernova explosion.

The same image as before, but now the location of the supernova is clearly marked by a red crosshairs.

A plot of the supernova's spectrum, from 3400-7400 Angstroms. There are several prominent dips due to the absorption from various elements. The right-most dip is labeled as "Si II" at 6159.75 Angstroms, representing the characteristic silicon absorption feature of type 1a supernovae.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Nope, it's water ice. It's too warm on Titan for methane ice, though only just.

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Reposted by S.M. Pritchard

Jonathan McDowell @planet4589.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Here is our (very simple) paper: Elvis M. and McDowell J.C. (2026) No cities on the Moon: a billion tons of water is not enough for sustainability; Frontiers in Space Technologies 7, 2026.1894104 www.frontiersin.org/journals/spa...

frontiersin.org

Frontiers | No cities on the Moon: a billion tons of water is not enough for sustainability

We show that, with reasonable consumption rate estimates, that (1) power is not a strong constraint on the lunar population but (2) the roughly 1 billion ton...

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I think it's supposed to be a parody of that ex-AI worker post from a few days ago.

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Reposted by S.M. Pritchard

Ken Burnside @kenburnside.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

RT if you’ve never had a tab of ChatGPT open, ever. Nor Grok, Claude, or anything else. And I turn it off the moment it tries to pop into other apps. I use @kagi.com to avoid AI summaries of my web searches.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Yeesh. I had a sense morale was bad there but I didn't realize it was *that* bad. We're not going to recover from this in our lifetime.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I thought Hubble's and Roman's focal ratios were driven in part by their science objectives, even if ultimately constrained by the KH-11 bus? And even if an "off-the-shelf" KH-11 is optimized for surface imaging, it would still have utility as a photometric survey tool at the very least, no?

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

All of these should be placed under civilian control and turned outwards to contribute to astronomy, so they can actually do something good for society.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

And undergrads who also felt like astronomy was their calling, like myself, have basically had our future careers ended before they could even begin. Maybe it's actually a blessing I've not had luck getting into grad school. Guess I should get used to industry.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Dolly Parton was a paragon of humanity, supporting childhood literacy and even helping save lives by donating $1 million of her own money to COVID vaccine research during the pandemic. While her loss is saddening, she made the world better for having lived in it. May we all aspire to such a legacy.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Yup! You can even detect some of them with apertures as small as 4-inches, depending on conditions (although you're much more limited in targets). Some people even had success using DSLRs!

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

My latest exoplanet transit observation from a few nights ago, so far my first and only clear night this entire month. This is TOI-2046 b, a hot Jupiter orbiting an F-type star 289 lightyears away in the constellation of Cassiopeia. It has a radius of 1.44 Jupiters and orbits in just 1.5 days. 🔭🧪☄️

A lightcurve graph of the star TOI-2046 showing the characteristic dip as its hot Jupiter exoplanet passes in front of it and gradually dims its light. The y-axis is relative flux. The x-axis is time, measured in the barycentric julian date (BJD). The graph is drawn in red, and a best-fit curve is drawn between the points, tracing a flat-bottomed U-shaped dip. There are two red vertical dashed lines that roughly mark the start and end of the U-shaped dip. The first is labeled "predicted ingress" and the second is labeled "predicted egress". Below that, there is another plot of black points with error bars, with a dashed horizontal line running through them. This is the plot of residuals.

$A black-and-white photo of a starfield. There is a bright saturated star with prominent diffraction spikes near the top center part of the image. An arc of bright stars forms a stretched out "C" asterism in the center of the image. One of the stars near the middle of this asterism is pointed out with a red arrow. This is the target star TOI-2046, which hosts a large transiting gas giant planet in a short-period orbit. In the top left corner of the image there is a pair of axes, one green and one yellow. The green axes are pointing straight down and straight right, and are labeled Y and X respectively. The yellow axes are labeled E and N. The E axis is pointing to the left and slightly down, and the N axis is pointing up and slightly left. Running along the top and left sides of the photo are yellow scale bars labeled 2.14'.$

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

This depends on the eccentricity of the orbit though, yes? I'm not sure how well-constrained our eccentricity measurements are for most M-dwarf terrestrial planets, but IIRC anything above like 0.2 is more likely in some kind of non 1:1 synchronous rotation similar to Mercury.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Surely it's the Sift, or a version of the Sift as recounted through villager legends. A dimension of souls, origin of the allays, font of all life in the overworld, etc.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

It would be a generational marketing blunder if they added an entirely new dimension to MCD but didn't also add it to Vanilla. We might not hear about it immediately, but I suspect it will be coming in the near future.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

I can't wait to see the Sift in vanilla!

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

We should absolutely have networks of research bases on the Moon, Mars, Callisto, and Titan, like we do in Antarctica. But the idea of entire cities or nation-states is frankly silly.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

So baby sifter is not the final name. Given it looks similar to the nester, is it just a baby nester?

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Lots of smoke tonight, so I didn't even bother setting up even though the sky is relatively clear.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

I hate that between the clouds and now recently these last few years, the wildfire smoke, doing any astronomy during the summer where I live is basically impossible.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

I hope we'll get another dev diary soon!! It feels like there's a lot less marketing for this game than there was for MCD1.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

This is one of the things that bothers me the most about solarpunk as aesthetic; the complete lack of any real ecological consideration or systems thinking. For instance, you know what else is solarpunk? Earthships. Xeroscaping. Windcatcher towers. But you almost never see those in solarpunk art!

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Hmmm, I'll take 200 eyes, but each eye is a hyperspectral imager each tuned to a small band of frequencies, such that the whole ensemble gives me an extremely detailed perception of everything from like 200 to 1000 nm.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Maybe not every technology needs to be developed. For being supposed experts in systems thinking, engineers almost always fail at understanding the systems that drive the use and development of tech for authoritarian ends. The prisoners are designing their own panopticon.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Will this be recorded for people who have already graduated?

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

you know what *greebles your rooftops*

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Reposted by S.M. Pritchard

Robert "The Bobby Yaga" McNees @mcnees.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

“Not to know what’s beyond is like spending your life in the cellar, being completely oblivious of all the wonderful things around us.” Astronomer Helen Sawyer Hogg was born #OTD in 1905. She was an authority on variable stars and globular clusters, and a sci-com pioneer. 🧪 👩‍🔬 🔭 Image: U. Toronto

A color photo of astronomer standing in front of a University of Toronto observatory. She is wearing a mauve jacket with a gold necklace and a gold broach on her right lapel. Her white hair is pulled back behind a headband, and her head is turned so she is looking upwards and to her right. She is wearing tortoise shell glasses.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Is it even likely thst there ever would be a commercial quantum computer? They seem like they'll only ever be a hyperspecialized device with very little practicality outside of that.

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Reposted by S.M. Pritchard

Peter Coles 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ 🇮🇪 @telescoper.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

The argument that curiosity-driven research should be supported because it reflects an essential part of human nature does not work if you try it on people who lost their essential humanity a long time ago.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Frankly, it should be illegal for ads.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

They also seem to abhor society as a concept entirely

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Step 1: Don't. Step 2: See Step 1.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

And also kinda pointless to boot

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

GOES sats are in geostationary orbit, they'll stay up there essentially forever. Generally they're bumped up into a graveyard orbit at EoL to make room for new sats since slots in the geostationary band are limited.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Thank you! I'll have a look at this tonight.

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S.M. Pritchard @smpritchard.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Maybe I'm not understanding something, but personally I don't see an issue with saying that consciousness could exist in a hypothetical non-biological system. Obviously, LLMs cannot be conscious, nor can any traditional form of computer. But I don't think there's anything special about "meat".

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