Bill Keel

@ngc3314.bsky.social

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Astronomer, husband, father, staff of cats, sometime trombonist

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Bill Keel

It's Paper day! Check out arxiv.org/abs/2406.20096, where we use Galaxy Zoo DESI to investigate the effect of large scale galactic bars on AGN presence

Galaxy Zoo DESI: large-scale bars as a secular mechanism for triggering AGNarxiv.org Despite the evidence that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) co-evolve with their host galaxy, and that most of the growth of these SMBHs occurs via merger-free processes, the underlying mechanisms...

Sighted on arxiv: "Our work highlights the importance of exploring strange new spacetimes, to (boldly) simulate what no one has seen before." Clough et al., What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse. arxiv.org/abs/2406.02466

What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp...arxiv.org Despite originating in science fiction, warp drives have a concrete description in general relativity, with Alcubierre first proposing a spacetime metric that supported faster-than-light travel....

I've found Copland's music to Appalachian Spring arresting ever since encountering part of it in marching band 51 years ago, and just today an announcer tells me that "Spring" is a body of water and not the season?? What else are all y'all keeping from me?

A bit of science time, updating statistics for Hubble + Radio Galaxy Zoo project. "Heterogeneous" sounds more scientific than "motley", right?

So one-gyro mode it will be for Hubble. A whole generation of solar-system and transient-source scientists cried out in pain, and their UV proposals vanished in silence. (I have many not-time-critical targets. Just saying.)

Backordered or not, magically arrived in time for Younger Son to visit from VA. I can't help thinking there are a lot of galaxies one could portray with that mix of color, texture, and globular-cluster circles.

Just sent team email re JWST manuscript revision pointing out that dust in high-z submm galaxies follows the same math as whether Kardashev Type III civilizations would build one gigantic Dyson sphere versus 10^10 "small" ones around the most luminous stars. Declaring this a good way's work.

Wait, WHAT? (Digs into box of obsolete figure-preparation tools and stares)

I recently had occasion to work with the beautiful "Cornu spiral" that is used in Fresnel diffraction calculations. It has been about 45 years since I first encountered it, but I never realized until now that it is the same shape as the "French curve" tools we used to use for manual drafting. 🧪🔭

That was awe-inspiring. My first aurora was an hour-long festival of pillars, green and red moving glows, and radiating spokes overhead. From the unlikely latitude of French Camp, Mississippi (Rainwater Obs. hosting a star party among some of the darkest skies in the southeast US). Whew.

Bit of a departure - I was an extra brass player for tonight's retirement concert by a friend who directs high-school bands (some of those youngsters are GOOD!). This month marks 50 years since I bought this bass trombone, during my first job out of high school. The finale had notes. Many notes.

Great result from (other parts of) JWST PEARLS team!

From Skylar Grayson: The Hubble Tension is one of the great mysteries of modern cosmology…can today’s paper help us solve it? 🔭✨️ astrobites.org/2024/04/16/t...

A New H0pe for the Hubble Constant?astrobites.org The Hubble Tension is one of the great mysteries of modern cosmology…can today’s paper help us solve it?

Reviewing data from last month - there is some weird stuff in the RCW catalog of galactic emission regions. Weird stuff. Take RCW 3 (AKA Sharpless 2-294) - anybody else can't help seeing tentacles, claws, and wings? No? Just me? (H-alpha, SARA 1m at Kitt Peak, during Milky Way transit that night) 🔭

NGC 3621+SN 2024ggi are southern, but not too far south from Kitt Peak as long as you mind the hour angle (BVR images, SARA 1m telescope, quick image composite). It's the bright star about 7:30 from the nucleus. I'd never paid attention to NGC 3621 before - intricate dust lanes near the core. 🔭

Properly downloaded pictures from Texas. Got Venus and Jupiter with point/shot camera while corona shone through clouds. Prominences w/250mm zoom on DSLR.

Aaaaaaahhhhh. A break between clouds for most of totality.

PSA: whether baseline human, feline beatnik, or eldritch abomination, and especially if you have spent strange aeons dreaming on the seafloor, look only with appropriate filters outside totality.

Face of a superpredator? Of course. During a Zoom mtg, Nonee started usual jump to my knees and shoulder for an appearance. Things under the desk had been rearranged so his trajectory was off, and he tried to correct with (trimmed) front claws, on my leg. Hit a vein w/alarming results. I left mtg.

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Bill Keel

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Benne W. Holwerda

VV191 is an overlapping pair of galaxies found by GalaxyZoo volunteers. There was an initial HST observation and now JWST observations resulting in this amazing picture with the first paper by Bill Keel (arxiv.org/abs/2208.14475). (2/10) 🔭🪐

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Bill Keel

It is paper day! Paaaaper day! Clayton Robertson’s paper on VV191 has been accepted for publication in AAS Journals. You can find it here: arxiv.org/abs/2403.15619 (1/10) 🔭🪐

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Bill Keel

Here’s xkcd explaining why I’ll be in Texas on Monday xkcd.com/2914/ 🔭👩‍🔬🧪

Eclipse Coolnessxkcd.com

Must be one more sign of age and being Not the Target Audience. I've started regularly noticing movies or TV programs set ~1960 where characters use words/phrases that were not at all in common use. Monetize, breakthrough (as in performance, bestseller).

JWST PEARLS team!

SN H0pe: a distant supernova that, due to gravitational lensing, appears 3 times from our perspective. I have no idea why this wonderful discovery hasn't been posted by the space agencies yet. Images from the articles- jwstfeed.com/Home/ShowFee... 🔭 🧪

Capturing some of my colleagues' feelings these days.

Aaaand that's another HST cycle done. At least now I keep the whole history on Dropbox and not all on my laptop.

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Bill Keel

Overlapping galaxy pair VV 191 as observed using JWST's NIRCam. arxiv.org/abs/2403.156... 🔭 🧪

Congratulations to all the people who make Zooniverse work (seriously, all, like 3x10^6 or something, and especially the ones who keep the infrastructure working while improving it). And to think I knew it when it was just Galaxy Zoo.

Congrats to the Zooniverse on being one of the winners of the US White House Year of Open Science Recognition Challenge www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-up...

Zooniversewww.zooniverse.org The Zooniverse is the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research.

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Bill Keel

Stop everything. You guys, my dad (Dave Steck) and I are running ultrahigh-energy cosmic ray telescopes out in the Utah West Desert this weekend and he JUST CAUGHT A MOUSE WITH THE MOUSE PAD. Kids, this is why you should go into experimental physics. #TelescopeArray 🧪

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Bill Keel

Lee Feinberg, JWST Telescope Manager, updates that JWST is back to normal! NIRCam suffered from tilt event and mirror lurch, and thanks to STScI, this issue has been resolved. 🔭 🧪

45 yrs ago - fastest my old car ever went was racing down I-84 when we spotted a break in the clouds just ahead of a total solar eclipse sweeping across Oregon, Washington and into Canada. Folks may find this useful planning for April 8 - a vast exposure range shows interesting detail at totality.

BTW if you already have eclipse glasses ahead of April 8, they will show this giant sunspot with no telescope or anything.

Today's image of the Sun with a closeup on that big sunspot group. 🔭