Corey S. Powell
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coreyspowell.bsky.social
Corey S. Powell
@coreyspowell.bsky.social
8.8K followers 950 following 1.6K posts
Fascinated by things very big, very small, and beyond the limits of the human senses. Founder of OpenMind: www.openmindmag.org Creator of the Invisible Universe column: https://invisibleuniverse.substack.com/
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coreyspowell.bsky.social
Historians are still decoding the complex calendar system in the Dresden Codex. Who knows what information was in the many other lost Mayan manuscripts.

All of this was done using centuries of carefully recorded, naked eye observations. 🧪

archaeologymag.com/2025/10/maya...
Eclipse table of the Dresden Codex. Credit: Justeson, J., & Lowry, J., Science Advances (2025)
November 11, 2025 at 12:55 AM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
I find this remarkable:

The Dresden Codex, one of the few surviving Mayan manuscripts, contains tables that give highly accurate timings of solar eclipses over more than 700 years, from 350 CE to the 12 century. 🧪🔭

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Sheets of the Dresden Codex depicting eclipses, multiplication tables, and the flood.
November 11, 2025 at 12:49 AM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
Wishing you all a happy Carl Sagan Day (born this day in 1934).

Fascinating to see his note summarizing the key topics he planned to discuss during his 1977 meeting with President Carter. ("Wonder"!) 🧪🔭

www.loc.gov/collections/...
A handwritten note Carl Sagan used to brief President Jimmy Carter and Vice President Walter Mondale. The note is written on Watergate Hotel stationery. It includes the terms exploration, wonder, the origin of life, the Voyager Golden Record, the scale of galaxies, cosmic pulsars, quasars, and black holes, and symbols for the planets Jupiter, Saturn and Mars. Carl Sagan, with all kinds of worlds in the background.
November 10, 2025 at 2:15 AM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
Here's a comparison between the sky that you can see with your human eyes & the sky seen through the radio eyes of the Murchison Widefield Array in Western Australia. 🧪🔭

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Top: The GLEAM/GLEAM-X view of the Milky Way galaxy. Credit: S. Mantovanini & the GLEAM-X team Bottom: The same area of the Milky Way in visible light. Credit: Axel Mellinger, milkywaysky.com
November 9, 2025 at 6:23 PM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
This is what the band of the Milky Way would look like at night if your eyes could see radio waves. A hidden beauty.

It's a new image created by the Murchison Widefield Array, which scanned the sky in 20 radio "colors" over frequencies from 72 to 231 megahertz. 🧪🔭

www.icrar.org/gleam-x-gala...
Astronomers from the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) have created one of the largest low-frequency radio colour images of the Milky Way ever assembled. This spectacular new image captures the Southern Hemisphere view of the Galactic Plane – the disk of our Galaxy, which appears to human eyes as the glowing band of the Milky Way – now revealed across a wide range of radio wavelengths, or ‘colours’ of radio light.
November 9, 2025 at 6:19 PM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
The Aaron Burr theory of customer service
Talk less smile more
November 8, 2025 at 8:16 PM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
Tidarren planets are named after this cannibalistic spider:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidarren
Tidarren spider
November 8, 2025 at 2:42 PM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
Astronomers call this planet a "Tidarren" world. It is probably the remains of a former star that was eroded down to planet size by its cannibalistic companion star. 🧪🔭

scitechdaily.com/jwst-finds-a...
Visualization that’s part of an animation of a black widow pulsar burning its companion. Credit: NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center / Cruz deWilde
November 8, 2025 at 2:02 PM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
Nature makes weird planets, and now this is among the weirdest: As big as Jupiter, made of carbon, blasted by high winds, and heated to 1900 degrees C by a dying, fast-spinning pulsar.

No matter how bad things get here, we live on the best of all possible worlds. 🔭🧪

arxiv.org/abs/2509.04558
Model of a pulsar planet. The companion light curve in two continuum bands interpreted with a pulsar direct heating model. The models are shown by the curves and the data are shown by the points. The model does not capture the strong orbit-to-orbit variations at minimum (ϕ ∼ 0 and ϕ ∼ 1), but provides a good description of the flux from the heated face and constrains the binary parameters. Schematics of the Earth-view of the heated companion’s surface temperature are shown below the light curve.
November 8, 2025 at 1:53 PM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
Meanwhile on Mars...

The planet is covered with odd gullies that look like they were carved by running water. A cool new experiment demonstrates that they were probably carved by sliding, spitting chunks of dry ice. (Sorry, still no signs of life.) 🧪🔭

www.uu.nl/en/news/myst...
November 6, 2025 at 11:18 PM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
This mysterious object, called Capotauro, might be the earliest, most distant galaxy ever seen, containing some of the universe's first stars.

Or it might be a mundane, nearby brown dwarf floating through our Milky Way.

Nobody said cosmology was easy. 🧪🔭

arxiv.org/abs/2509.016...
CEERS U-100588 (named provisionally as "Capotauro") is an astronomical object detected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey, which could be an extremely distant Lyman-break galaxy with a photometric redshift (z) of 32, a dusty interloper galaxy with a redshift (z) of 6, a rogue planet or a Y2–Y3 spectral type brown dwarf.
November 4, 2025 at 7:21 PM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
Finally, there's this iconic image from JWST. Sure, they can call it the "Pillars of Creation," but this is obviously a giant Monkey's Paw that has already curled two fingers. 🧪🔭

esawebb.org/images/pilla...
By combining images of the iconic Pillars of Creation from two cameras aboard the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, the Universe has been framed in its infrared glory. Webb’s near-infrared image was fused with its mid-infrared image, setting this star-forming region ablaze with new details. Myriad stars are spread throughout the scene. The stars primarily show up in near-infrared light, marking a contribution of Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). Near-infrared light also reveals thousands of newly formed stars – look for bright orange spheres that lie just outside the dusty pillars.
October 31, 2025 at 3:05 PM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
A particularly weird one: The Flying Bat Nebula has the Squid Nebula inside of it.

Is the bat carrying a squid? Did it swallow a squid whole? Somebody needs to work out the mythology here.

www.nebulaphotos.com/sharpless/sh...
The red (Ha Signal) is sh2-129, the flying bat nebula. The blue squid nebula (OIII signal) in this image (OU4) was discovered by the French Amateur Astrophotographer Nicolas Outters in 2011. It is very faint.
October 31, 2025 at 2:56 PM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
The Bat Signal Nebula, just released by the European Southern Observatory.

www.eso.org/public/news/...
This image shows a cloud of gas and dust, shaped like a cosmic bat. The image was obtained mostly in visible light with the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), hosted at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. The intense red glow comes from hydrogen atoms ionised by the intense radiation of young stars within the cloud. The image also includes additional infrared data captured by ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), also at Paranal. The most prominent clouds here are RCW 94, which represents the right wing of the bat, and RCW 95, which forms the body, while the other parts of the bat have no official designation. Credit: ESO/VPHAS+ team/VVV team
October 31, 2025 at 2:52 PM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
The Goblin Nebula, imaged by father-son duo of Bill & Chad Williams.

www.williamsseaandsky.com?page_id=2324
This object I imaged because I wanted to use it in my Halloween lecture at the star party. There was so much data taken over four days that I didn’t have it ready by the time the lecture happened! Since it is a very northern object, light pollution from Chiefland added many varied processing challenges! This image consists of 17 hours of LRGB data of vdb141 which I call the “Goblin Nebula” – you will see why. Actually, I believe vdb141 is the bright “flame” portion of this image; I like the ghosts! This image is 17 total hours LRGB, color binned 2X2 with the STL-11K camera @-20C with Gen I AstroDon filters. My favorite shot of this nebula is by Bob Fera. He has a very dark north according to Tony Hallas who lives nearby. Also, this Goblin (albeit small) is featured on APOD on October 30, 2008 showcasing a wide dusty field.
October 31, 2025 at 2:51 PM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
The Ghost Nebula, haunting the constellation Cassiopeia.

esahubble.org/news/heic1818/
IC 63 — nicknamed the Ghost Nebula — is about 550 light-years from Earth. The nebula is classified as both a reflection nebula — as it is reflecting the light of a nearby star — and as an emission nebula — as it releases hydrogen-alpha radiation. Both effects are caused by the gigantic star Gamma Cassiopeiae. The radiation of this star is also slowly causing the nebula to dissipate. Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA
October 31, 2025 at 2:48 PM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
The Witch Head Nebula, located near the bright star Rigel in Orion.

www.nasa.gov/image-articl... 🧪🔭
As the name implies, this reflection nebula associated with the star Rigel looks suspiciously like a fairytale crone. Formally known as IC 2118 in the constellation Orion, the Witch Head Nebula glows primarily by light reflected from the star.
October 31, 2025 at 2:46 PM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
Astronomers sure do conjure up a lot of spooky images when they look out into deep space. A short Halloween thread:

Let's start with the Cosmic Bat Nebula (LDN 43). 🧪🔭

apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap24102...
What is the most spook-tacular nebula in the galaxy? One contender is LDN 43, which bears an astonishing resemblance to a vast cosmic bat flying amongst the stars on a dark Halloween night. Located about 1400 light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, this molecular cloud is dense enough to block light not only from background stars, but from wisps of gas lit up by the nearby reflection nebula LBN 7. Far from being a harbinger of death, this 12-light year-long filament of gas and dust is actually a stellar nursery. Glowing with eerie light, the bat is lit up from inside by dense gaseous knots that have just formed young stars.
October 31, 2025 at 2:44 PM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
Fascinating graph shows the estimated total mass of all the mammals living on Earth.

In 1850, it was evenly divided between wildlife and humans + domesticated animals. Today, humans and their livestock account for about 95% of the total. 🧪

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Black labels indicate absolute biomass estimates, gray labels indicate the fraction of the total estimated biomass of mammals (see Fig. S9 for the estimated fraction of global biomass). Top: the total biomass of humans and domesticated mammals (cattle, buffalo, swine and others). Bottom: the total biomass of wild marine mammals, along with a coarse, preliminary estimate of the total biomass of wild land mammals, based on previously published temporal abundance estimates.
October 30, 2025 at 1:58 PM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
Many objects in space have obscure names (HD 219134b) or unhelpful classical names (try to find the dog of Canis Minor, I dare you).

But the Red Spider Nebula really looks like a spider in space--the breath of an old, dying star caught in a web of interstellar gas. 🧪🔭

esawebb.org/images/potm2...
This new NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month features a cosmic creepy-crawly called NGC 6537 — the Red Spider Nebula. Using its Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam), Webb has revealed never-before-seen details in this picturesque planetary nebula with a rich backdrop of thousands of stars. Planetary nebulae like the Red Spider Nebula form when ordinary stars like the Sun reach the end of their lives. After ballooning into cool red giants, these stars shed their outer layers and cast them into space, exposing their white-hot cores. Ultraviolet light from the central star ionises the cast-off material, causing it to glow. The planetary nebula phase of a star’s life is as fleeting as it is beautiful, lasting only a few tens of thousands of years.
October 29, 2025 at 4:17 PM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
Apparently you can buy a shark rocket for less than $15, which strikes me as a pretty good deal
shark rocket
October 29, 2025 at 4:09 PM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
Spectacular time-lapse image of Comet Lemmon (C/2025 A6), taken by astrophotographer Michael Jäger.

There might have been, um, a few satellites passing by during the long exposure. 🧪🔭

forum.vdsastro.de/viewtopic.ph...
October 28, 2025 at 7:31 PM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
More space beauty for your day: This new JWST image of Uranus shows exquisite detail in the rings, clouds, and huge polar cap. Imagine what it took to knock this planet on its side.

Processing by Andrea Luck. 🔭🧪

www.flickr.com/photos/19227...
Uranus image from JWST
October 28, 2025 at 11:54 AM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
What a strange, beautiful shot of Comet Lemmon, now passing through the northwest sky after sunset.

Here you see 2 comet tails (gas and dust), plus the unrelated zigzag trail of a passing meteor. And, inevitably, a couple satellite trails, too. 🧪🔭

star.ucl.ac.uk/~apod/apod/a...
C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) is a non-periodic comet discovered by the Mount Lemmon Survey in images obtained on 3 January 2025. Here seen beside a meteor trail.
October 28, 2025 at 11:38 AM
coreyspowell.bsky.social
Early results from Chang'e-6 indicate late-period volcanism on the Moon & deepen the mystery of why the Moon's farside looks so different from the side we see.

The Chinese lander also gathered a beautiful & intriguing collection of impact glass beads from the Moon. 🧪

news.agu.org/10-23-2025-g...
Glass beads scooped up on the far side of the Moon during the Chang’e-6 mission. Credit: Yan, Xiao, et al. JGR Planets https://doi.org/10.1029/2025JE008945
October 27, 2025 at 3:36 PM