Judy Schmidt
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geckzilla.bsky.social
Judy Schmidt
@geckzilla.bsky.social
2.2K followers 150 following 600 posts
Galactic Janitorial Services
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geckzilla.bsky.social
here is a photo of my cat, Tofu
A gray tabby cat laying on a tan blanket and light gray carpet. her hind legs are outstretched and she’s holding herself up with her forelegs because she was interrupted from grooming her belly. her mouth is open mid meow and looks like a happy smile
September 27, 2025 at 6:43 PM
geckzilla.bsky.social
hah, I was just making my own idea.... 😆 45° cut lining up with the corner of the stairs.
September 20, 2025 at 3:32 PM
geckzilla.bsky.social
A view of NGC 2719 (and friend) for tonight. Hubble processing. PI @dalcantonjd.bsky.social

archive.stsci.edu/proposal_sea...

flic.kr/p/2rtF2mU
Two irregular, bright, and pale blue galaxies sit together. One is long while the other looks more like a ball. A faint stream of stars trails from the ball galaxy to the lower right. A few small, red Milky Way stars dot the image. Many faint background galaxies are scattered throughout without distracting from the subjects of the image.
September 16, 2025 at 3:15 AM
geckzilla.bsky.social
just tryin' some more stuff
A sketchy, unfinished painting of a purple dragon laying on the ground in a greenish landscape with a pale yellow and purple sky in the background. There are some wiry trees and some very poorly rendered foliage.
September 15, 2025 at 5:58 AM
geckzilla.bsky.social
Just passing some time. Like where this is going, but now I've got some astronomy data calling my name...
An unfinished, sketchy painting of a gnarly old white dragon on a dark background looking up at nothing in particular. Its wing is at rest, and its long, thin tail is curling toward the viewer. There are scant colors in the image. The face is somewhat detailed, but most of the other parts are nebulous at best.
September 10, 2025 at 1:49 AM
geckzilla.bsky.social
HST two-color view of NGC 1068.
Proposal 17165 / @astronomisty.bsky.social
archive.stsci.edu/proposal_sea...

Some more info, plus links to all the other processing I've done of this galaxy.
flic.kr/p/2rsj7rm
A sharp view of a very dusty spiral galaxy. The center glows with a pale but warm yellowish light with two prominent arms of brown dust encircling it. Multiple pockets of blue stars are visible between the spiraling lanes of dust, and a smooth, soft blue halo of light fades to darkness at the edge of the galaxy as the stars and dust become more sparse. A few orangey background galaxies are visible through the dust. The scene is almost absent of Milky Way stars, making it a very clear view of the galaxy.
September 9, 2025 at 5:24 PM
geckzilla.bsky.social
pondering what a K and a J would look like in the Def Leppard logotype wasn't on my list of things I ever thought I'd be doing but here we are.
Album cover art for Def Leppard modified digitally to replace "Def Leppard" with "RFK Jr" and the title "Hysteria" with "Listeria". The art from the cover is from a time when artists used airbrush and paintbrush and taped and glued things together physically before creating some final art piece. There is a conglomeration of strange white and green human faces screaming. A red triangle dominates the cover. There are geometric lines creating arcs that form a circular shape. Some angular ones form triangles. The lines seem kind of sci-fi. It's difficult to convey the multiple negative feelings the cover evokes due to the artistic nature of it, but the original title of Hysteria lends a clue.
August 27, 2025 at 4:29 PM
geckzilla.bsky.social
An image I made quite a while ago finally got published in a multi-image press release at the Chandra website today. HST, Chandra, VLA, and JWST data all in one.
flic.kr/p/2qb3dUX
chandra.si.edu/photo/2025/c...
An extravagantly colored spiral galaxy. Red, orange, dusty arms of infrared light blend together in one splotchy, swirling mess. Bright patches of speckled star formation dot the arms all over, some tiny and some large and complex. Soft, blue x-ray light is seen along a diagonal axis from the upper left to lower right, along with some small fuzzy dots speckling the image in seemingly unrelated ways. The center is bright white with relatively smaller magenta colored jets along the same diagonal axis.
August 25, 2025 at 3:06 AM
geckzilla.bsky.social
here’s a photo of my cat Noodle
A cat with gray stripe fur around his eyes and ears and white fur on his belly, feet, and nose laying upside down on a tan carpet. He has green, narrow slit eyes and is very much enjoying a soak in the bright sunlight. His pink nose looks foreshortened and larger than usual due to camera optics. One of his ears is flooded under his head.
August 23, 2025 at 8:18 PM
geckzilla.bsky.social
Why does mommy stress clean?
A US style electrical outlet. There large black are scorch marks emanating from the top prong holes.
August 17, 2025 at 8:40 PM
geckzilla.bsky.social
Worked on this yesterday with my new found free time with the kid starting school.

From HST Proposal 17067,
The diversity of protoplanetary disks: Imaging a complete sample of edge-on disks in four nearby star-forming regions

Principal Investigator: Gaspard Duchene

flic.kr/p/2rnisMm
A serene celestial scene with soft and subtle blue clouds and a scattering of stars. The three brightest stars are nestled within a central hollow of the nebula. Their light gently reflects from the nearby cloud rim, shadowing into a vignette at the periphery. A few of the stars stand out with an orange glow. There is a tiny but noteworthy orange "hamburger" of an accreting star in the left half of the image. Looking closer, one can see the "buns" are actually broad cones of light and the "patty" is the shadow of the accreting disk of dust. The star itself is unseen. This is actually the subject of study for the image.
August 13, 2025 at 4:28 PM
geckzilla.bsky.social
Real email from my crappy assemblyman. lol
A screenshot of an email. The header features a smiling, fully bearded man in a blue suit and yellow tie, with the title text assemblyman Juan Alanis, 22nd assembly district. The text of the email read simply: Dear Neighbor, Newsom Bad Redistrict Bad Sincerely, Juan Alanis, Assemblyman, District 22
August 12, 2025 at 12:58 AM
geckzilla.bsky.social
prepare to feel trolled. JWST over an ESO image (www.eso.org/public/image...)
The Cat's Paw Nebula in visible light from ESO with a tiny postage stamp of infrared light from JWST in the upper left corner. The nebula looks vaguely like a cat's paw reaching from the upper right with toes to the lower left. It's very red and magenta with a bunch of blue stars. The JWST image also looks like a cat's paw, sort of, with three toe beans covering its postage stamp, but it's actually just a tiny fraction of the overall nebula in the upper left quadrant. It's hard to make up all but the largest details of the JWST image. There's a white border around the inset image to make it easier to stand out, otherwise it might actually get lost because the image is so detailed and messy and the inset is so small.
August 7, 2025 at 4:20 AM
geckzilla.bsky.social
Back again with late night astro posting. WR 112 as seen by JWST

From GO 4093: Fingerprinting the history of episodic dust creation in Wolf-Rayet binaries, Principal Investigator Noel Richardson

flic.kr/p/2rkausy
A starry space scene. There are small blue stars scattered randomly but fairly evenly around the image. One bright star dominates the image left of center by several orders of magnitude. It is surrounded by reddish orange shells which visually appear as rings or a very tightly wound spiral. Each shell is almost exactly the same shape as the shell preceding it, resulting in an unusual geometric oddity. The slightly imperfectly circular shapes further lend to the baffling presentation of the image. There are 8 prominent blueish multi-colored diffraction spikes interjecting from the star. They are hard to ignore, but have little meaning beyond indicating that the star was very bright on the detector of the telescope.
August 2, 2025 at 6:26 AM
geckzilla.bsky.social
quick little addition: this is the center brightest shell, just in case you were wondering if it is also textured. it is! it's just hard to see when the dynamic range is shoved all the way up into the brightest parts of the image. (edit: forgot to rotate the image. fixed; deleted old post)
A close-up of the center of the Apep star system. The image is grayscale. It's a bit blurry because it's been enlarged digitally. The bright star at the center is overexposed along with small parts of the nebula, but the rest is remarkably detailed. The somewhat circular swirl of a nebula has a bumpy texture. The nebula has a wide, round head, with a tapering tail curled around it. It evokes embryonic imagery, or... perhaps a cat curled around a star.
July 30, 2025 at 5:12 AM
geckzilla.bsky.social
Apep. JWST. It's weird. Just look at it.

From GO 5842: What lies beyond the inner spiral of Apep?
Principal Investigator: Yinuo Han

flic.kr/p/2riELBn
A nebula with a bright star at its center. The nebula has three distinct layers, and the pattern in the layers repeats in a way that implies there are more layers outside the image boundaries, though they would be faint. The shape of the nebula is something like nesting yin yangs, with the center smallest one bright and dense, shining, smooth and golden. The middle one is orange and textured like a sherpa blanket. The largest, outer shell is fainter, and red like an ember. Its texture has softened along with its dissipation into space. There are some small stars speckled around the image, and one annoyingly bright, spiky one that's got too many colors because of the way the light spreads from point sources through the telescope's optics. A pale haze of grayish cloud also covers the scene, but it is sheer and translucent.
July 25, 2025 at 4:57 AM
geckzilla.bsky.social
🙃
July 24, 2025 at 5:59 PM
geckzilla.bsky.social
WR 48A from JWST. You know you need some weird in your day.

From GO 4093: Fingerprinting the history of episodic dust creation in Wolf-Rayet binaries, Principal Investigator Noel Richardson

flic.kr/p/2riubcR
A bright, white star sits right of center. Concentric white rings surround the white star, but are mainly only visible from the 10 o'clock and 5 o'clock positions. The rings appear at mid inclination rather than face on. There are pale clouds around the star, some of which look like skinny comets (they are not comets) with trailing tails, brightest parts toward the star. There are many other stars in the image, but they are dim compared to the very bright subject of the image. Rays known as diffraction spikes surround the star in geometric precision. They are distracting artifacts, but it easy enough to look past them. There are some muddy brown at the top and left of the image and a dark blue to the bottom left. The colors do not necessarily have much bearing on the image as the rings are the important part.
July 24, 2025 at 5:55 AM
geckzilla.bsky.social
It... it could use a few more exposures. 🫠

I'd assume there's details in the coma, but wouldn't personally infer too much from the data. Just wait for it to get closer, methinks.

3I from Hubble David Jewitt / Proposal 17830 with hat tip to @astrafoxen.bsky.social
A heavily processed image of interstellar comet 3I. A fuzzy oval sits in the center of a grainy grayscale image. An obvious but nondescript coma trails to the right and slightly upward, relative to the image frame. A sharp, bright point at the center of the coma indicates the nucleus. Two stars sit at the upper right of the frame, blurred by the motion of the telescope following the comet, unremoved by processing.
July 22, 2025 at 1:23 AM
geckzilla.bsky.social
Processed a quick little dust cloud today with an embedded young stellar object. It is cataloged as IRAS 20126+4104

From proposal 17188, PI Ruben Fedriani
Cosmic Beacons Towards a Theory of Massive Star Formation - A NIR View of the Most Luminous Protostars

flic.kr/p/2rhZt2F
A very starry, low color astronomical image featuring a cloud of gas and dust. At the center is a small, reddish glowing part of the cloud, giving the visual impression of an embedded light source. The rest of the cloud is pale gray where some light is passing through, and a dull brownish red where the dust is thicker and blocking some of the light. The stars have typical cross-shaped symmetrical diffraction spikes.
July 21, 2025 at 11:51 PM
geckzilla.bsky.social
Went ahead and added wideband blue and some hydrogen alpha to the image.
The same galaxy as in the previous post, but with more visible hues. In particular, the brilliant yellow core is now even more yellow, and the outer arms are even more blue. Mottled splotches of magenta now accompany the brightest blue star clusters in the arms.
July 2, 2025 at 8:35 PM
geckzilla.bsky.social
A quick request galaxy: Two color HST view of NGC 4303 (Messier 61) flic.kr/p/2rdhwGn
A very detailed view of most of a spiral galaxy. The outer arms are off the edge. The center is the brightest part—a brilliant yellow core. Two swirling arms are flecked with dark brown dust and blue stars. Many individual stars and star clusters are discernible all over the image. A few reddish background galaxies are seen in the darker areas. Notably, there are only two foreground Milky Way stars, so the view of the galaxy is very clear and clean.
June 27, 2025 at 4:42 AM
geckzilla.bsky.social
i have to go out and get a photo of it because this is now my baby and i’ll cry if it dies again
a tiny green sprout growing from a cut stem at ground level. four fingers are next to it for scale, making it look very tiny indeed. behind it is another dead looking stem with nothing growing. there’s some compost looking stuff in the dry dirt too.
June 10, 2025 at 2:20 AM
geckzilla.bsky.social
hang in there
cw: spider
May 31, 2025 at 1:18 AM
geckzilla.bsky.social
I drove up to @phaneritic.bsky.social’s house and snagged one. Not ashamed to have gotten it ahead of them being available at the online shop. Give me my one perk for living in the valley 😆
May 16, 2025 at 10:04 PM