♀ vs. ♀

Oh jeez I should not write about this. I don’t even want to. I’m doing it anyway. It’s this professional tension between senior women astronomers and junior women astronomers which I hear about it from the juniors, not a lot and never loudly, but intensely. I think — I think — I see both sides […]

Guest Post: What It’s Like to Peer Through Hubble

For a brief period of my life, the Hubble Space Telescope would shoot me an email with a link about once every two weeks. Then I would click and wait. Then hundreds of thousands of stars would spill across my monitor, lighting up cells in my eyes with photons from a screen from a file […]

Alien Planets & Astronomers Behaving Like the Rest of Us

Remember a month or so ago, when astronomers running NASA’s Kepler satellite announced they’d release the data on 300 possibly earth-like planets but keep the 400 best possibilities proprietary to NASA and announce it all next February?  And non-Kepler astronomers, the media, and the internet fussed at the Kepler astronomers for being dogs-in-the-manger?  And then […]