Our lightcurve of 2025 RL2 from last night shows that it is a fast rotator with a lightcurve amplitude of 0.7 mag. The asteroid is either tumbling with a main period of 4.36 minutes, or it has a complicated shape, resulting in a lightcurve with four peaks of different height and period 8.71 minutes.

I am proud to announce that Northolt Branch Observatories have been awarded a 2025 Shoemaker NEO Grant by The Planetary Society! 🎉🔭🌠
www.planetary.org/articles/202...

I was reminded recently of some ideas a friend and I had for a paper, back in the days when 1I/'Oumuamua was discovered. There were already some interesting things floating around back then. Surely this stuff would get us into the New York Times nowadays. ⚗️💩🔭

@keelingcurve.bsky.social This has just been announced by the International Astronomical Union. 🔭🧪✨
www.wgsbn-iau.org/files/Bullet...

Marc Delcroix reports a potential impact in Saturn captured in a few frames in a video observation obtained by Mario Rana. The very short impact flash occurred on Saturn on July 5th 2025, between 09:00 and 09:15 UT. He's looking for other videos to confirm. See here: pvol2.ehu.eus/pvol2/news/v...

Animation of the candidate interstellar object A11pl3Z passing through the inner Solar System.

Close approaches to planets:
Mars on 3 October 2025, at 0.187±0.003 au
Jupiter on 16 March 2026, at 0.396±0.016 au

Image credit: CSS, @asteroiddave.bsky.social 🔭
neofixer.arizona.edu/css-orbit-vi...

On this day in 1945, US troops liberated Dachau concentration camp.
My great-great-grandfather Hermann Willstumpf (1894-1958), a political prisoner since 1939, was being marched there from Straubing. The guards lost control around April 28, he escaped, and returned to his family weeks later.

The article is so old, nobody knows who started it, or what it looked like when it was promoted to "featured article" status.

Wikipedia's longest continuously featured article en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzanti... has just been demoted, after 23 years and 327 days.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

Mein Artikel "Die ältesten Kirchenbücher des Amtes Battenberg" erscheint in den nächsten Tagen in der Märzausgabe der Hinterländer Geschichtsblätter. Ich gebe darin einen Überblick über neueste Erkenntnisse zur Geschichte der Pfarreien Battenberg, Battenfeld und Laisa.

To my knowledge, the naming of (429733) Gilbertbaker, a large Amor-type Near Earth asteroid, marks the first -- even indirect -- representation of the LGBTQ community in space.

In 1854, Kaup purchased the original Mastodon fossil excavated in New York in 1799. It became one of the first fossils ever mounted for display.
August Klipstein is a distant cousin of mine. Our common ancestor, Caspar Klipstein (1627–1679), was a forester in my hometown.

Jakob Kaup is best known as the discoverer of Deinotherium, a prehistoric giant elephant. In the 1830s, his friend August Klipstein purchased a quarry in Eppelsheim, near Darmstadt, and invited Kaup to excavate with him. In 1835, they unearthed the first-ever Deinotherium skull.

A friend took some images of "my" asteroid (128345) Danielbamberger in February, and sent me the raw data today. I turned it into a little animation. It's been a while since I've seen that rock! 😄🌠
Visible here at 21.3 mag. Images taken at Deep Random Survey, Chile (X09).