we had spent much of the (chilly) evening in the countryside away from any lights, but my favorite image of the night ended up being the aurora just casually, majestically, filling the sky above our homes

slow-motion capture from a student's phone:

Teaching some comparative planetology, it turns out that lighting half-buried firecrackers in a bed of sand does a pretty nice job of simulating the formation of impact craters ; ) 🧪🔭

I think about this plot all the time, and especially with respect to things like autism. If you’d lived in 1940 and had access to this data, would it feel like an “epidemic” of left-handedness?

But in the next scene we see our main character(s) on or near what appears to be the "padlock bridge" on the Seine. We again see the Moon roughly aligned with the river. But the river runs SE-NW here(!) The timing and geometry therefore make it impossible to have the full Moon in this scene.

Next, we have a nice shot of the Eiffel Tower with the bright gray full moon in the background. I'm not sure exactly where this is taken from, but the placement of the river suggests from somewhere around the Galeries area(?) That would put the Moon low in the ~southern sky - which is good!

The next scene where we see the Moon has to be sometime between 130am and 4am. Here the Moon is relatively low in the sky - a more realistic altitude, but a huge shift in position compared to the previous scene - when when the maximum distance the Moon could have moved is roughly ~45 degrees.

Okay: the first issue is that of the Moon's altitude. It is 130 am, and suggested to be midsummer. Belly looks (very) high into the sky and notes a full moon. But at Paris' 48.9N, the highest altitude the Moon could be (near solstice) is about 23 degrees above the horizon ~[90-(48.9+23.5-5)]

The Summer I Misplaced the Moon... #TSITP 🔭

Watching the finale last night I happened to notice a few oddities regarding the placement of the Moon, so I wrote a quick set of review slides to work through with my intro astro class ; )

(other than times/locations, this should be spoiler free)

The two kinds of overleaf authors 🧪

We had an over 99mph(!) derecho pass through last night and lost a few of our favorite small trees. Thankfully house is fine we are all safe & sound!

I think about this quote at least once week, from @laurarbnsn.bsky.social

Moving things over to this site, including this post: If you haven't seen it, the ADS (ui.adsabs.harvard.edu) has a nice author network visualization tool showing who an author has published with, with links between different networks. From author search results -> Explore -> Author Network 🧪🔭

These images are amazing! And Nasmyth & Carpenter's 1874 whole book on the Moon is worth exploring (at: archive.org/details/cons...), including numerous photographic plates of plaster models made to simulate the appearance of the lunar topography (image grab from a recent chapter I wrote):

From what appears to be the corresponding paper (arxiv.org/abs/2411.15089) :

A reminder from a NASA History Office tweet: happy anniversary to the release of the Pioneer Venus 2 large probe and three small probes into the Venusian atmosphere (Dec 9, 1978), and with this amazing artwork by Paul Hudson. #astronomy