James Davenport
@jradavenport
Astronomy professor in Seattle. Coffee drinking, year-round-plaid wearing, joke telling space dad. Searching for ET, caring for humans. 🔭☕️🎤
Finally watching The Mandalorian and Grogu. Really fun movie so far, but why do directors do this, switching between letterbox and widescreen? Very distracting to me.
and we find some really interesting systems! Here is just one metric we use: Number of Flares recovered in each ~25 day TESS Sector. You can see a clear rise/fall over many years, just like we observe for the Sun!!
My group and I have been working on flare statistics, and looking for their variation, since the Kepler era. Here's an example of a nice active star in our sample, with clear starspot signal (slow, sinusoidal variation) and flares (red)
The CVZ is the "Continuous Viewing Zone(s)", the areas that TESS will observe nearly continuously for a year at a time, as shown in this excellent animation from tess.mit.edu/mission-over...
So when you Google "mitch mcconnell" you get this result, and I just think that is a bit amusing...
OK, I mocked this up while having a lazy Saturday w/ my kids... Some little changes I'd probably make, but overall I like the idea 😁 I think if we had ~10, we could make a test pack
@capricephillips.bsky.social giving colloquium today at UW Astronomy, talking about the best stars! 🧪🔭
He issued the committee all safety goggles and then demonstrated the impact of transient clouds on the brightness of stars (the flash light)… it was epic
Extremely proud advisor day: @andyastro.bsky.social successfully defended his thesis on variable stars, and wow, the audience and his committee with a liquid nitrogen demo. Bravo Dr Tzanidakis! 🔭🧪
Shout out to the UW Law School for finding an innovative way to expand their classroom space: an inflatable bouncy castle!
@niais.bsky.social showing how “simulations” of merging galaxies were done in the 1940’s 🤩🔭🧪
As a possible antidote to the AI nonsense, I submit this HR Diagram I saw posted in a classroom today. Top tier!
I spent a bunch of time making a full scale Rubin Observatory in Minecraft, and for what?!?!?
So I think this is interesting... ELT (the largest optical telescope ever, currently being built) and the Sphere in Las Vegas are approximately the same size and cost, roughly speaking
Grrrr, I’m logged out of my coffee cup, and apparent the password doesn’t work with my telephone’s facial recognition. The future is… certainly something
I gave an Astronomy on Tap talk last night in Seattle about Apollo 14 with a fun ending. Who said #scicomm has to be serious or boring?!
The code to generate it is here github.com/jradavenport... Which also includes a proposed Flag of Mars
After #ArtemisII I’ve been seeing folks online talking about the Flag of Earth. Years ago I tried to design an updated version that was astronomically accurate. Thoughts?! 🔭🧪🚀
Seattle folks - come hang out with me @ Stoup in Cap Hill on Wednesday for #AoTSeattle! I'll be talking about Apollo 14, my new favorite Apollo mission... See you there! astronomyontap.org/event/astron...
I was going to do some cutting edge astrophysics research today at this premier R1 university, but instead I’m ONCE AGAIN dealing with HVAC issues that I know won’t get fixed and bracing for another chiding email about the dangers of space heaters and 2-ply toilet paper
This simulation is what a 1 watt optical laser would look like a few AU away, with a low resolution spectrograph and a few minute exposure. Super detectable!
Huh, its almost like somebody who fucking hates America got ahold of one of the keys to its excellence in Jan 2025... grant-witness.us/funding_curv...
every part of this is adjustable, of course. Here we place the focal point of the dish closer to the surface, making it a bit more "screen accurate" math is fun! 🔭🧪💻🎨🎥
Spent a bit of time today drawing this model in Python, which I think will be highly useful in upcoming papers...