Brett Morris
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brettmorr.is
Brett Morris
@brettmorr.is
9.8K followers 460 following 780 posts
Astronomer, software engineer. Supporting space telescopes, open science, and accessibility in astrophysics.

Thrilled and haunted by dots on stars.

http://brettmorr.is/

Posts my own, not my employer's.
Posts Replies Media Videos
brettmorr.is
Elementary school student Ruby Bridges escorted at school by a team of US Marshals to protect her from segregationists. Louisiana, 1960.
November 4, 2025 at 2:20 PM
brettmorr.is
Q: How old is the star HD 140283, at the center of this image?

A: Quite nearly as old as the universe itself.

Paper (Lundkvist et al., from last week): arxiv.org/abs/2510.11532

View on the sky: aladin.cds.unistra.fr/AladinLite/?...
HD 140283 viewed in Aladin Lite with Pan-STARRS DR1 imaging. In the field of many stars,HD 140283 is bright, and relatively blue in this colormap.
October 20, 2025 at 6:15 PM
brettmorr.is
gut check on the fall of the republic:
Airport disclaimer that the airport does not agree with the partisan TSA video that is required to play thanks to dog murderer Kristi Noem
October 17, 2025 at 4:46 PM
brettmorr.is
Quite shocked to see that my colleagues left graffiti in the men’s room at BWI.
An expansive back-illuminated mural of JWST images of the Carina Nebula, with stars in blue and dust in gold.
October 14, 2025 at 4:02 PM
brettmorr.is
One from years passed still lives on my lamp.
A small koala stuffed toy holds onto a thin lamp stand.
October 2, 2025 at 10:56 AM
brettmorr.is
New feature released in the @jupyter.org Sidecar package: set new sidecar locations relative to other sidecars. Make dashboards/default arrangements of multiple widget outputs!
Thanks for the help, @martinrenou.bsky.social. 🧪

Install: pip install sidecar

Demo code: gist.github.com/bmorris3/b3e...
September 26, 2025 at 6:22 PM
brettmorr.is
solar flounce Snape flounce, from Background Slytherin (@emilyscartoons)
September 24, 2025 at 1:52 PM
brettmorr.is
Stars don't go quietly into that good night. 🔭🧪

Here, a dying star is spitting itself out in all directions. A companion star nearby may be shaping the points in the splatter.

webbtelescope.org/contents/new...
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s view of planetary nebula NGC 6072 in the near-infrared shows a complex scene of multiple outflows expanding out at different angles from a dying star at the center of the scene. There is one stretching from roughly 11 to 5 o’clock, another from 1 to 7 o’clock, and possibly a third from 12 to 6 o’clock. These outflows push gas toward the equatorial plane, forming a disk that appears to span from 9 to 3 o’clock. Astronomers suspect there is at least one other star interacting with the material cast off by the central dying star, creating the abnormal appearance of this planetary nebula. In this image, the red areas represent cool molecular gas, for example, molecular hydrogen.
July 30, 2025 at 2:19 PM
brettmorr.is
Neat! @flarelord.bsky.social used ground-based photometry to measure the flare temperature on an M7 dwarf.

How do you measure temperature without spectroscopy? Trick question! You use the Earth's atmosphere as a prism and watch the star appear to jump across the sky. 🔭🧪

arxiv.org/abs/2507.19584
Figure 1. Panel A: Light curve of the DWF030225.574- 545707.45 flare expressed as g magnitudes in excess of the quiescent stellar brightness. As noted in Webb et al. (2021), the lightcurve does not return to pre-flare brightness before the end of the observing period. Panel B: Raw d∥ measured on the images, relative to source position at t0. The weighted average d ∥ of 91 reference stars, weighted by the stars’ astrometric standard deviation across the entire time series, is shown as a grey line and the standard deviation of their relative position itself is shown as a filled region. Panel C: detrended d∥ of the flare star generated by subtracting the weighted average d∥ of the reference stars shown in Panel B. A 9-point rolling median is shown by the dashed black line. Panel D: Rolling median over an 9-point window of the detrended data shown in Panel C, and the time series used for subsequent analysis in this work.
July 29, 2025 at 2:04 PM
brettmorr.is
I love Baltimore I do I do. I really do.
Feels like temperature is 112 F, 44 C
July 25, 2025 at 8:49 PM
brettmorr.is
To the right you’ll see the Roman Space Telescope at NASA Goddard yesterday, and me! 🧪🔭

This is the first space telescope that I’ve supported before its launch. If you can’t tell by my face, I really hope it won’t be the last.

Last time I visited this clean room, it held JWST 🥹
Brett standing in front of a window overlooking the big clean room at NASA Goddard, where spacecraft are assembled. The Roman Space Telescope is behind Brett to the right. The Roman Space Telescope, without its solar array, and with a foil covering for thermal vacuum testing. The Roman Space Telescope solar array.
July 19, 2025 at 10:51 AM
brettmorr.is
The brightest star in Scorpius, Antares, is nearing the end of its 15 million year life. It's so large that the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars would be inside the star. 🔭🧪

Pilate et al. published brightness maps of the star, showing gigantic convective cells.

arxiv.org/abs/2507.08614
Relative brightness maps of Antares over the course of a year, showing the changing brightness and shapes of convective cells in the stellar photosphere.
July 14, 2025 at 1:21 PM
brettmorr.is
Does this remind anyone else of @dalcantonjd.bsky.social? 🔭
Purple haired woman in graffiti with white glasses and light bulbs and flamingos in her hair.
July 12, 2025 at 3:39 PM
brettmorr.is
Until the spectra are available on MAST, here's an interactive visualization app for exploring OWLS spectra and the corresponding MWO HK Project chromospheric activity time series, when available. 🔭🧪 #stellarastro

Try it out: github.com/bmorris3/owl...

Powered by viz tools from @stsci.edu! ❤️
Interactive visualization tool for time-series spectra from the Olin Wilson Legacy Survey (OWLS). OWLS is monitoring stellar magnetic activity cycles with optical echelle spectra of FGKM stars with the ARC 3.5 m Telescope at Apache Point Observatory (APO).
July 11, 2025 at 11:05 AM
brettmorr.is
Presenting: the Olin Wilson Legacy Survey (OWLS). 🧪🔭 #stellarastro

Since 2019, Leslie Hebb, Suzanne Hawley and I have been monitoring spectra of bright northern stars including those monitored by Olin Wilson from ~1965-2000, and planet-hosting stars

And we're not done.

arxiv.org/abs/2507.07330
Figure 7. Time series of S-indices for five targets with a range of spectral types. The top three panels show data from 1965 to 2024 for HD 78366 (F dwarf), HD 81809 (G dwarf), and the K-dwarf HD 26965, including historic MWO data (timespan in yellow) and newly obtained OWLS measurements (timespan in blue). We plot a curve on the G and K stars with three Lomb-Scargle (sinusoidal) terms, with periods ranging from 8 to 15 years. The OWLS S-indices from 2020-2024 for two M dwarfs GJ 388 B and GJ 494 are shown in the bottom row.
July 11, 2025 at 10:48 AM
brettmorr.is
Meet the Cat's Paw Nebula, 5,500 light years towards Scorpius, where new stars are forming from the ashes of their ancestors. Observed by JWST with NIRCam. 🔭🧪

webbtelescope.org/contents/med...

This is the universe they're trying to take from you.
To celebrate NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s third year of highly productive science, astronomers used the telescope to scratch beyond the surface of the Cat’s Paw Nebula (NGC 6334), a massive, local star-forming region. This area is of great interest to scientists, having been subject to previous study by NASA’s Hubble and retired Spitzer space telescopes, as they seek to understand the multiple steps required for a turbulent molecular cloud to transition to stars. With its near-infrared capabilities and sharp resolution, the telescope “clawed” back a portion of a singular “toe bean,” revealing a subset of mini toe bean-reminiscent structures composed of gas, dust, and young stars. Webb’s view reveals a chaotic scene still in development: Massive young stars are carving away at nearby gas and dust, while their bright starlight is producing a bright nebulous glow represented in blue. This is only a chapter in the region’s larger story. The disruptive young stars, with their relatively short lifespans and luminosity, will eventually quench the local star formation process. The Cat’s Paw Nebula is located approximately 4,000 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius.
July 10, 2025 at 2:27 PM
brettmorr.is
Seems accurate. Metaphor or otherwise.
Alert on my phone says: “fire truck on fire” nearby.
June 30, 2025 at 7:03 PM
brettmorr.is
gamma Cas is a naked-eye star 550 light years away, and you've seen it as the middle star in the group of five that makes the "W" shape in Cassiopeia.🔭🧪

It spins *so fast* that it's rugby ball shaped, and coming apart. New observations show that it would look like this:

arxiv.org/abs/2506.15027
Synthetic image of the star's shape, which was made with a stellar model that is consistent with the observations. The star is shaped like rugby ball, and it is an asymmetric brightness distribution. The star is white-hot near the pole, to the lower left, and blueish near the equator.
June 22, 2025 at 3:21 PM
brettmorr.is
The peri peri main sequence is a naturally occurring correlation in color and ripeness of the pepper.

Gaia G - RP captures the principle component.

Higher ripeness resolution is obtained in flavor space, though human detectors saturate well below the bottom of the sequence. 🧪🔭
A line of peri peri peppers from ripe, dark red on the left, to deep green on the right.
June 21, 2025 at 12:50 PM
brettmorr.is
They’re good time series, Bront.
Tree rings.
June 14, 2025 at 3:48 PM
brettmorr.is
Running in Druid Hill Park, or as @benjaminpope.bsky.social might call it, the Baltimore solar archive. 🔭
Cut trees stacked high.
June 14, 2025 at 3:47 PM
brettmorr.is
My top aspiration for my open source software is that someone could use it to successfully solve hard problems in astronomy without needing to contact me at all.

This work by Mayuko Mori et al. was a joyful read even *before* seeing which tool they used. 🥹🔭🧪

Enjoy: arxiv.org/abs/2506.06445
Figure 3. Observed transit light curves of TOI-3884b (top to bottom: three transits observed with MuSCAT3 or MuSCAT4; left to right: g-, r-, i-, and z-band) and the corresponding best-fit models (black lines). The error bars in the datapoints are scaled to make reduced χ2 values equal to 1. To the right of each light curve, the spot distribution on the stellar surface at the corresponding epoch is shown, as modeled with fleck. The x mark in the figure shows the location of the stellar pole, the dotted lines show the stellar equator, and the regions inside dashed lines indicate the transit chord.
June 10, 2025 at 1:44 PM
brettmorr.is
Watch the solar plasma curve along magnetic field lines like iron filings near a bar magnet. #stellarastro 🧪🔭

This work was funded in part by NSF.
May 29, 2025 at 2:19 AM
brettmorr.is
<whine 🔭>

NASA ADS has 1,473 results containing "in the era of JWST" in the title, abstract, or full text. I think that's quite enough.

Can we please, as a community, remember that there are other interesting and meaningful ways to say "now"?

</whine 🔭>
NASA ADS can find 1,473 articles containing "in the era of JWST" in the title, abstract, or full text. And I say that's enough.
May 28, 2025 at 3:05 PM
brettmorr.is
Pope Leo, did you watch Game of Thrones? Just wondering.
The High Sparrow prepares to announce Margery’s sentence in Game of Thrones.
May 19, 2025 at 12:28 PM