HDE 226868

For the Americans here: Lots of support for astronomy in the Senate CJS report, way more than the Presidential Budget Request or (at the moment) the House's recommendations. Fingers crossed that things keep looking up.

Only got some subpar aurora photos -- my phone camera is, er, not great -- but it's still pretty bonkers how far from the poles it reached.

Great -- just did it.

Mind if I delete the comment chain?

@uhoh It's pretty minor -- just didn't want anyone to get miffed at you. :-)

nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02503-x

Today's the last day of science operations at Arecibo. :-/

@uhoh September 24th.

Hey, there's nothing wrong with more good candidates!

@RoryAlsop Thanks for undeleting; I just noticed this.

opens door, turns on light

@Shalvenay Good to see you, too. There's been at least a tad more folks in here lately. . .

@VLAZ I'm less concerned about the mechanics of finding them -- more just of the subjectivity involved in trying to classify any given one as salvageable or not. But I dunno, maybe that's not a huge hurdle.

@VLAZ I think that's probably true; I'd just like to figure out how non-zero it is.

@JourneymanGeek Ya.

@JourneymanGeek Yeah, I'm trying to think of how I could do so objectively. Ish.

munches pepperoni roll, takes out butter

I'm sure some people would be . . . not thrilled if it were edited a little to be on-topic. But for some . . . I dunno. I feel like we're much quicker to close than to try and salvage prior to closure.

This is just me muttering to myself as I make dinner, but . . . I wonder what fraction of questions we have that end up closed could be salvaged by (comparatively) aggressive editing.

@Feeds Diving into some of radio astronomy's proudest and least proudest moments, I see.

Did anyone manage to get a good peek at the eclipse?

checks time I think I've slipped in before midnight for most of the regulars. . . Barely.

Happy Monday, to those who . . . don't hate Mondays.

@JourneymanGeek The name of both the mascot and a specific fairly active user (I was thinking of the latter in this case).

(There's also Slarty, who's still around -- maybe those names sloshed together?)

Yeah, Secespitus was never a mod here, but very active on meta and a semi-prolific editor, if I remember correctly.

@Pleiades Hey, welcome back! It's been a while.

@muru Huh, one of the weirder reputation-related bugs I've seen. . .

@DialFrost There's been some good advice here; I'd second sphennings' advice that you should make sure that the question is at the right level of generality, and that it's not too specific that it won't be helpful for other folks.

@muru Are you all set on that? Just did a quick check and saw you don't have anything deleted.

^ A real option for the rsync command. There's a fairly believable parallel universe out there where an erroneous keystroke on the terminal summons Cthulhu.

@VLAZ Ope, misremembered -- I was thinking that the discussions this spring that banned it network-wide happened earlier than they did.

I think we're still at 0 on HSM, which is easier to monitor given the low answer rate. Astronomy falls prey from time and time, and Worldbuilding . . . blerg.

@JourneymanGeek I try not to be greedy.

@TheCommander I'll be simultaneously disappointed and proud in Worldbuilding if we ever manage that.

(And the WB mod team has been taking action against generative AI posts, given the strong site consensus against them. There are more than we'd like, unsurprisingly. . .)

@VLAZ The network-wide rules mean that we can now enforce the ban on AI-generated posts; they were always prohibited (IIRC), it was just that mods could only actually take action against posts/users in a very, very narrow range of circumstances.

\o

@WorldbuildingMeta I tried to keep the Magrathea references to a minimum.

Yeah, definitely.

I'm hoping they won't shelve improvements in place of Discussions.

@JourneymanGeek That would be very nice.

. . . And I want to make sure it's not an idea that just falls by the wayside.

@AndyD273 I'm going to work on something like this -- maybe add something specific about how we as a site tend to use chat, encourage people to talk about their worlds, etc.

@Kilisi L.Dutch just added a comment about his reasoning (I don't think folks get notified about comments on deleted answers, but I might be remembering incorrectly). Sorry about the lack of communication.

Haha, fair.

For efficiency I guess more massive stars are better. But also . . . you know . . . more dangerous.

@JBH Ah, sorry, my wording was imprecise -- I was talking about warping through tidal forces, rather than gravitational lensing -- so kinda like the Mice Galaxies. Tidal distortion would only be applicable to nearby neighbors, rather than background galaxies.

In what direction is the galaxy located? 0.5 Mpc puts it well within the Local Group -- closer than Andromeda -- and depending on its position it could significantly distort the shape of some of the smaller galaxies in the group.