Dr. Craig DeForest ☀️
@craig
Dad, mountaineer, heliophysicist. I lead the PUNCH space mission and direct a team at SwRI. I like science, space, communication, humans, dogs, horses, puns. Lowering barriers and promoting open science are priorities. My personal account; my opinions.
The most novel part of the PUNCH mission (@punch-mission.bsky.social) is its three WFIs. Deeply baffled, with optics from @televueoptics.bsky.social, they make polarized images of the entire inner solar system every 4 minutes. The Solar Physics article just dropped! Read it here: rdcu.be/fvaSc ☀️🧪🛰️🔭
Spotted this #EV prototype at the top of #PikesPeak on Monday. It's an interesting body design, reminiscent of chopped-top, chunky refits of 1940s classics. Looks like it can't decide whether to be an SUV, a station wagon, or a hatchback.
Comet Pan-STARRS provided a nice reminder that the solar wind is not just a stream of disconnected particles. It is a fluid -- with flows, turbulence, and all the other things that fluids do. ☀️🧪🛰️🔭🚀🪐⚛️
This probably comes as a shock to nobody, but #unitedairlines has really sucky wifi. 700ms ping , few-percent packet loss, peak speeds well under 1Mbps, several-minute lag on popular websites like this one. #Panasonic is bringing us forward into the 1990s!
Holy cow! Feast your eyes a while, on this gorgeous solar spectrum by the Sol'Ex instrument (assembled by Váradi Nagy Pál). It extends to UV and IR as well as the visible band. Marvel at the F lines, the fine structure, the IR doublets and repeating lines, and the molecular bands. Wonderful! ☀️🧪⚛️🔭
It's not every day your sketch gets featured on #Wikipedia's featured-image page. I still love that chimerical-color template. 5-May only: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ After that, look for 5-May here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...
Time to register for PUNCH-7, if you haven't! You won't want to miss this one if you're a #heliophysicist. PUNCH data are turning out to be spectacular. (More on that soon). ☀️
This was good day, two years ago. We got to see the solar corona, and an enormous arch prominence! @astronamir.bsky.social and @dbseaton.bsky.social organized CATE, a huge array of telescopes that captured the eclipse across North America. One of the sites was right there in the Cotton Bowl. ☀️🧪🔭
Nice to see PUNCH (@punch-mission.bsky.social) getting used to track MAPS. The next day or two will be fateful -- will MAPS survive its perihelion on Saturday? ☀️🛰️🧪🔭https://www.facebook.com/share/p/171r4kMk32/
Thinking about poster presentations today in our weekly group meeting. Remember to use white space, font size, and graphic design to draw people in. This oldie-but-goodie is a nice reminder of that. 🧪
Happy birthday, @punch-mission.bsky.social! One year (minus two hours) ago as I post, this (pic) happened in California. 40 min later, the 4 PUNCH satellites deployed over Africa. Since then, we've downlinked ~1.5 million images of space – and changed the way humanity sees our environment. ☀️🛰️🧪🔭
This week I visited Reed College, my alma mater from the 1980s. Highlights included dinner with the physics department (including Mary James and David Griffiths) and touring my old haunts at the Reed Research Reactor. Wonderful department - highly recommended. ⚛️🎢🧐
<thud>! Another PUNCH paper dropped today! Congratulations to Sarah Gibson on this omnibus theoretical treatment of polarization in solar wind structures. Given the simplicity of the Thomson scattering mechanism, it's pretty amazing how deep the rabbit hole can go. 🧪☀️⚛️🔭🛰️ bit.ly/4qT9Kvs
Today I had the amazing opportunity to view @swri.org's second printing (1710) of Galilei's "Dialogo". It once belonged to a "Vittorio", who scrawled his name on the flyleaf. Nice to think that, as scientists, we're part of a long story populated with like-minded folks across the years. #rarebooks 🧪
I caught this rare picture of the contrail compound being loaded on an aircraft! The plane's contrail generator (1 of 2) is the large nacelle to the right of the workman. A chemical reaction inside it creates CO2 but also dihydrogen monoxide, which makes visible trails in the air. #chemtrails
It's not every day you get to announce a new research article -- especially one you've worked on for a complete solar cycle. The PUNCH article came out in the journal Solar Physics today! ☀️🛰️🔭🧪 rdcu.be/e0XlR
Hey @officialbenshapiro.bsky.social, how do you feel about this quote now?
Yes, indeed! Here's a plot shown by Dr. Sami Solanki, winner of the #AAS Hale Prize, in 2022. It compares solar brightness to Earth's climate shift. For 20 years the Sun had been ~0.1% fainter than its long-term average, reflecting weak activity in the last two cycles. We don't (yet) understand why.
This reminds me of the warning sign I saw last year at Surf Beach, CA -- which, now that I think of it, is a good indicator of a healthy (aka neglected-by-people) ecosystem.
We had a great time when my son and his girlfriend came to visit over the holidays. Encountered a little turbulence in downtown Denver. #train #turbulence #illusions
This morning I had the singular pleasure of visiting the Lake Ponchartrain causeway (world's longest over-water causeway, I'm told) and examining it with binoculars. It was a cloudy, blustery day but I can confirm that, yes, the world is round.
Here's a fun science nugget from @PUNCH-mission.bsky.social: a colorized polarimetric image of the extended solar corona, with bonus dust trails from a micrometeoroid impact! ☀️🛰️🔭
"There's something about the outside of a horse that's good for the inside of a man" -- discovering my inner #TeddyRoosevelt. (#horses, #trailriding)
Swiss Dawn from the 61C intercity Bern->Basel. Had a great week at ISSI, participating in the solar eclipse/middle-corona conference by day and PUNCH support by night.
Still going on! 10pm MST, 40°N, 105°W. Lots of dynamics and structure. #aurora ☀️🔭
From my backyard in the Colorado Rockies, a few minutes ago (about 2025-11-12T03:30Z; 11/11/25 8:30pm MST) #aurora 🔭🧪☀️