🌃 Merideth

@stellarplexus

Give me SPACE! Astro nerd, naturalist, animal friend, research librarian, writer, reader, sketcher, former island hopper, aspiring forest witch

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🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· 15d

Every time I see “Jelly Roll” I’m like but wasn’t he born in the 1800s or something? Pretty sure he has to be dead, but he keeps getting mentioned all of a sudden. So is he a jazz zombie now or what

Maggie Smith as Peter Pan’s elderly Wendy, long since grown up, in the 1991 movie “Hook,” looking uncertain.

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· 29d

Happy Rock Day! Here’s my recent haul from a sunny evening at a local river (by the end of the day my pockets were Extremely Heavy for some mysterious reason).

$The bottom of a rectangular teal basket covered in a colorful spread-out assortment of rounded and worn river rocks, in a variety of soft colors and speckled, pocked or fractured textures and patterns.$

The same teal basket of river rocks as the previous image, but now sprayed with water, making the surfaces glossy and bringing out much richer colors, especially the oranges, reds and subtle blue-green tones.

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· Jun 20

A painting of a fiery red-orange tree, framed against a backdrop of a still green pond, with rounded green shrubbery on the bank, all illuminated brilliantly in afternoon sunlight.

Tag says
“Society of Washington Artists
2026 Spring Show
Maria Witt
Japanese Garden #1
Oil
$300”

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· May 20

This is a cat checkpoint. Relinquish your most recent cat picture from your phone.

An extra fluffy cat named Ivy, gray with undertones of tree bark, a white muzzle, yellow-green eyes, and extra magnificent long white whiskers, curls up on a soft blanket in the afternoon sun.

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· May 17

If you were a video game character, what would your health pickup be.

Individual Koala’s March chocolate filled biscuits, each one koala shaped and stamped with a koala doing something different, like hugging a toy, eating a snack, dressed in a costume, etc. The bitter chocolate ones in the dark boxes are my favorite.

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· Mar 30

Cherry blossoms dangling in the sun-glow, from last week at the Japanese Garden. Even when it otherwise seems a scarce commodity, there’s hope in the advent of spring, in the resurrection of lovely green live things and their riotous displays of fresh, unfurled, unapologetic color.

The branch of a Japanese Cherry tree, festooned with pale pink five-petalled blossoms, dangles in front of a patch of mossy brown-green spring grass; the whole scene is soaked in a pool of warm, golden late afternoon sunshine.

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· Mar 25

Post a non-religious photo you think of as holy.

Two rare and ghostly white albino deer lit up against the pitch dark backdrop of a Michigan forest at nighttime, a photo taken by wildlife photography pioneer George Shiras (1859-1942).

After members of an Ojibwe tribe showed him how they lit fire in a pan at the bow of a canoe to hunt in the dark, Shiras used a kerosene lamp and rigged up elaborate systems of trip wires and remotely controlled cameras to capture wildlife in the near perfect darkness of the forest at night, a novel technique he called flashlight trapping.

Beloved white deer, possibly direct descendants of these two captured by Shiras’s camera well over a century ago, are still glimpsed regularly around Marquette, Michigan to this day.

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· Mar 5

Your last saved meme is your moral philosophy. (If ten thousand bees texted me I would already be outside trying to make ten thousand new friends, so… ok. Yes. 🐝 )

It’s a text message from Ten Thousand Bees. “Come outside,” it says. Not at all suspicious.

(I totally would, because I LOVE bees.)

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· Feb 22

The most colorful things in my cupboard, “pastel fiesta” Malted Milk Eggs (US): Titanium dioxide, Red 40 lake, Red 3, Blue 1, Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Blue 2 lake, Blue 1 lake, Yellow 5 lake

A bowl of colorful malted milk egg Easter candies, resembling speckled bird’s eggs, in pastel green, lavender, white, pink and blue.

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· Feb 9

I have this exact model! She is always at maximum fluff and the house is never quiet. Her name is Ivy. She’s a delight every single day

A soft fluffy gray cat named Ivy, with long white whiskers

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· Jan 18

So one cold night a young iguana fell out of a tree on the road outside my work. I was driving a golf cart around the property and had exactly zero urge to handle an iguana, aggressive and ornery creatures that they are, but a truck was coming and I couldn’t just leave it there to get run over, so…

Colorful map of central and south Florida entitled “Falling Iguanas Monday Morning.” It indicates that iguanas are “rare” north of the white dotted line (crosses between St. Pete and Vero Beach) and that they’re “plentiful” south of the red dotted line (crosses between Port Charlotte/Fort Myers and Palm Beach).

The key reads:
<32F Potentially Fatal (pink)
32-40F Immobile [Alive] (dark blue)
40-45F Cold Stunned (light blue)
45-50F Sluggish (green)
>50F Marked Safe! (yellow)

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· Jan 5

An orange creamsicle sunset tonight. The human world might be a hot mess but the natural world is still fantastic as hell.

An orange creamsicle colored sunset, the light dispersed by a fine, misty rain, over a calm lake. Framed by the inky dark silhouettes of various pine and cedar trees and brambles.

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· Dec 28

“Describe your Bluesky account in a single image”

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· Dec 17

Three characters, a tiny tan octopus, a gray shark with pink cheeks and a pink jellyfish, on a pale seafoam green background. “I once saw a human and peed myself,” says the octopus. “A human saw me, and he peed himself,” says the shark. Then the jellyfish says, “A human touched me once, and his friend peed on him.” “Dude…” says the octopus. “What?” says the shark.

(wawa wiwa comics)

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· Dec 6

Years ago this pic circulated, of a man who took his 19yo dog swimming in icy Lake Superior every night after he was diagnosed with severe arthritis. I think of them often when I think about what love means. 💕

A man with a ponytail lounges shoulder-deep in water, holding his dog with the dog’s head tucked peacefully under his chin. The text reads: “John Unger cradles his 19 year-old dog Schoep to sleep every night in Lake Superior so the buoyancy of the water can sooth his arthritic pain.”

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· Nov 27

“You will be visited by three spirits.” The three spirits:

Three men stand in a row wearing elaborate matching mariachi inspired embroidered costumes in red, white and black, with ruffles and sombreros, and holding silver pistols. They are clearly real heroes who can fight off the notorious El Guapo and not silent film actors desperate for work.

(A promo still from the 1986 movie Three Amigos. From left to right: Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, Martin Short)

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· Nov 23

She wore a raaaaspberry beret

The Pope, in his white robes, ‘sings’ into a microphone.

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· Nov 11

Best thing I’ll see today, I’m sure.

Arm wrestler Venn diagram meme. One arm is “Rick Astley,” the other is “Lake Superior.” Bring them together and you get “Never Gonna Give You Up.” YES.

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· Oct 31

Came across this model of a ring of mesovortices in another thread a few days ago and it’s quite something to be able to see it in real life, just like that. Too cool.

A drawn diagram of the circular eyewall of a hurricane, lined within all the way around by a ring of small filled-in, eye-like ovals that represent mesovortices, small scale rotational features churning inside a larger storm.

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· Jun 20

Amazing and completely gorgeous new shot of the silhouette of the ISS as it transits the sun, taken in the Arizona desert last Sunday by the brilliant @ajamesmccarthy.bsky.social. 🔭

The tiny black silhouette of the International Space Station stands out against the fiery orange and gold sea of the surface of the sun.

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· Mar 14

“Under the 'has cleared its orbital neighborhood' and 'fuses hydrogen into helium' definitions, thanks to human activities Earth technically no longer qualifies as a planet but DOES count as a star." Love this one, @xkcd.com. 💕

xkcd comic with a table entitled Planet Definitions, with highlighted diagrams corresponding to the following philosophical approaches:

Traditionalist: Pluto is a planet
Modern: Pluto is not a planet
Expansive: Dwarf planets are planets
Ultratraditionalist: Only the classical planets are planets
Condescending: Only giant planets are planets; the rest are big asteroids
Simplistic: Anything gravitationally round is a planet
Grounded: Only objects a spaceship has landed on are planets
Regolithic: Anything covered in dirt and ice and stuff is a planet
Lunar: You can’t be a planet if you don’t have a moon
Solipsistic: Earth is the only planet
Judgmental: Only the prettiest ones are planets
Empiricist: Only worlds that I, author of this table, have seen are planets
Marine Biologist: Only objects with oceans are planets
Maritime: Only objects with *surface* oceans are planets
Universalist: They’re all planets
Existentialist: What if space *itself* is a planet?
Spiteful: *Only* Pluto is a planet

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· Mar 14

A terrible (old iPhone) photo of a smoky sky, but a lovely red moon.

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· Jan 8

I always feel drawn to the Waterman Butterfly. Runner-up: the Pierce Quincuncial. Also the Winkel Tripel when the lines of longitude aren’t too compressed, and the Natural Earth. <3

An illustration of the Waterman “butterfly” map projection, which arranges Earth’s continents in four distinct, equal lobes joined together along the top halves, in a clustered shape resembling the wings of a butterfly.

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· Jan 4

Venus and the moon, in this evening’s violet twilight.

Phone photo of the moon and Venus close together, low in the sky over some silhouetted palm trees. Taken just after sunset.

🌃 Merideth@stellarplexus· Dec 14

Love Sonnet XVII, always.