Boxer

The Moon is Full 🌝

As others have pointed out, there could be an influx of newcomers to the #Fediverse from #Brazil who are tired of #Meta 's latest shenanigans while meddling with politics.

If you see them, be friendly and welcoming, and under no circumstances start with "You are using the Fediverse wrong!"

I mean it. We have a serious "Reply Guy" problem around here, and we've already lost our big chance with Black Twitter. Let's not screw _this_ opportunity up, okay?

2000 tonnes of steel sliding on a few microns of oil!

Our Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) was tilted for the first time in Oct 2026. To point anywhere in the southern sky the telescope needs to rotate on two different axes. A few months ago it rotated on its vertical axis for the first time. Now, tilting on its horizontal axis is another step in the right direction.

More: https://www.eso.org/public/videos/potw2643a/

📹 ESO/Cimolai/Apical/G. Vecchia

#astrodon #astronomy #astrophysics #space #science #engineering

✊

#protest

Daily bird 71 - Golden pheasant

A Pacific Trumpetfish, aka Nūnū, an unassuming but important reef predator. Your #sealife #photooftheday

Prints available - DM me. #nose #fish #sunday #creature #ocean #sea #marinelife #animals #nature #wildlife #environment #earth #photo #photography #underwater #AIFreePhoto #Oahu #Hawaii #reef

Egg’s Night
Wildernesses provide amazing views. It’s up to us to protect them.

#photography #newmexico #silentsunday

The island that goes dark to save young seabirds https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/oct/25/corvo-azores-corys-shearwaters-switch-off-saving-seabirds-aoe

"Every autumn, #Corvo Island in the #Azores turns off its public lighting for a few key days to help fledgling Cory’s #shearwaters as they attempt to fly to the ocean guided by the stars... It began in 1991 when the community noticed huge numbers of deaths among #birds... Local people began rescuing them at night, roaming through the village in the dark. This inspired other communities"

#Birds #LightPollution #Portugal

A long but essential perspective: 'AI is devastating higher education, but the system was already broken' https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-ai-is-devastating-higher-education-but-the-system-was-already-broken-292988

Sister ship Voyager 1 is currently ~23h 56m 34s of light travel time from Earth (2026:298:120000:1L)

Dark Matter in a Simulated Universe
Image Credit: Tom Abel & Ralf Kaehler (KIPAC , SLAC), AMNH

Explanation: Is our universe haunted? It might look that way on this dark matter map. The gravity of unseen dark matter is the leading explanation for why galaxies rotate so fast, why galaxies orbit clusters so fast, why gravitational lenses so strongly deflect light, and how visible matter is distributed. The featured image from the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium Space Show, Dark Universe, highlights one example of how pervasive dark matter might haunt our universe. In this frame from a detailed computer simulation, complex filaments of dark matter, shown in black, are strewn about the universe like spider webs, while the relatively rare clumps of familiar baryonic matter are colored orange. These simulations are good statistical matches to astronomical observations. In what is perhaps a scarier turn of events, dark matter -- although quite strange and in an unknown form -- is no longer thought to be the strangest source of gravity in the universe. That honor now falls to dark energy, a more uniform source of repulsive gravity that seems to now dominate the expansion of the entire universe.

https://science.nasa.gov/image-article/apod-2026-october-25-dark-matter-in-a-simulated-universe/ #apod

All of human accomplishment - an entire history of vast technological advancement. And yet the enduring achievement will be the Nazca Lines. No one gives a shit about the iPhone mate, show me your big ground drawings.

Since we don't know where Cotton Eye Joe came from, nor where he went, this means we know neither his speed nor his position, which means Cotton Eye Joe may very well be the missing link between Einsteinian and Quantum Physics.

Never Mind Ancient Authorities, Do the Experiment!

In the 16th century, science was rooted in studying and debating the works of ancient authorities like Aristotle and Galen—until Francis Bacon arrived to challenge this paradigm.

by Joe Schwarcz

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history-general-science/never-mind-ancient-authorities-do-experiment

Francis Bacon at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/296

#books #literature #philosophy #science #education

:asteroid: 4 Vesta

The rather cleaner version with a more consistent background.

258 x 60s with a :seestar_s30: on 22 October 2026, from inner city Melbourne.

#astrophotography #asteroid #space #seestar #astrodon

Major Moons of Uranus

New modeling shows that there likely is an ocean layer in four of Uranus' major moons: Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon. Salty – or briny – oceans lie under the ice and atop layers of water-rich rock and dry rock. Miranda is too small to retain enough heat for an ocean layer. The modeling, detailed in a paper published in the Journ...

More: https://images.nasa.gov/details/PIA25500
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

#uranus #voyager #astrodon #astronomy #astrophotography #astrophysics

This makes me cackle with glee.

JPL has a job posting for a media relations person. Used a cool-o image for enticement. And they picked our image from our drill work in Greenland!

Ok, much of this daylight looking picture is the result of how good cameras are now. But this is a shadow of a tree cast by the moonlight at nearly midnight. That’s how bright the moon is without any other environmental light.

Voyager 1 is 25.84 billion km/16.06 billion miles away from Earth and will reach 1 light-day from Earth in 24 days, 6 hours: https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/solar-system/#/sc_voyager_1/distance?to=earth

Voyager 2 is 21.63 billion km/13.44 billion miles away from Earth: https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/solar-system/#/sc_voyager_2/distance?to=earth

#Voyager1 #Voyager2 #voyager #nasa #space