Take a look at one of the illustrations from "Astronomia Nova", which shows the orbit of a planet.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.sstatic.net%2F8322a.jp...

Disclaimer: I'm an astronomer.

The following webpage contains a set of light curves and videos from astronomers in Europe who succeeded in measuring the brief dimming of Betelgeuse last night:

    https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcall4obs.iota-es.de%2Fob...

> I would bet money that I am the only person present
> who ever got paid for programming in APL.

    I'll take that bet. I made a bit of spending money in college by acting as a computer labbie in a room full of IBM 3270 terminals running APL. I wouldn't call my past self an expert, but I could help the occasional student working on a course assignment.

Whoever wrote the summary should be fired.

For those who did not read the paper: the paper starts with a model of the stellar population of the Milky Way, and a model for stellar evolution, and predicts the positions of stellar remnants (black holes and neutron stars). It is not a catalog of actual black holes and neutron stars observed by astronomers.

Actually, this joke was first made by a BRITISH (well, sort of) astronomy at Maynooth University in Ireland. He posted it, and then the French astronomer stole the joke and re-posted it the next day without attribution.

See

    https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftelescoper.wordpress.c...

For those who want to read the original paper, go to

      https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.aanda.org%2Farticles...

Correction: any Earth-sized planet in another stellar system will most certainly NOT subtend "several pixels"; instead, any such planets will be point sources. In brief, diameter of Earth is around 10^7 m, while the nearest star is of order 10^(16) m away from us. The angular size of the Earth at such a distance would thus be 10^(-9) radians, which corresponds to 0.0002 arcseconds.

In comparison, the diffraction limit of JWST at a wavelength of 2 microns is roughly (2 x 10^(-6) m)/ (6.5 m) = 3 x 10^(-7) radians. That's more an an order of magnitude larger than the angular size of the Earth at the distance to the nearest star; for the great majority of stars -- which are much more distant -- the difference is even larger.

tl;dr JWST will measure Earth-like exoplanets as point sources.
 

I am fairly confident that if Amazon could replace all of the people who work for them with robots they would have done so long ago. They are not a company known for caring for their workforce and they are not keeping people around out of the goodness of their hearts. Amazon employees people because that is the best way for items to get packaged up and sent out.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fabs%2F2106.149...

The Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) on JWST has a channel which can take images at wavelengths as short as 600 nm = 0.6 microns. That's within the range of human vision, contrary to your statement.

Moreover, since JWST has an aperture roughly 2.5 times as large as that of HST, the images it takes at 600 nm will be sharper than those taken by HST. It's true that the plate scale NIRCam will prevent it from fully sampling this higher resolution, but the images taken by JWST at this wavelength will certainly rival those of HST, and perhaps exceed them in some cases.

In part, as described by the other commenter, because the number of characters needed to type to carry out a simple task is often smaller for awk than for perl. But mostly because I started using awk before Perl existed ... so I just keep using it.

Thanks, Mr. Aho. Awk has saved my bacon many, many times. I still use it several times a week.

Taken from the Planetary Society's website:

Planetary Society members and supporters funded the world's first Mars microphone on NASA's Mars Polar Lander, which launched in 1999. It was the first citizen-funded science experiment to fly to another world. Sadly, the spacecraft crashed on Mars later that year. We were scheduled to refly the microphone experiment on a French Mars mission called Netlander that was ultimately canceled in 2004. NASA's Mars Phoenix lander had a microphone aboard, but it had to be turned off before launch due to last-minute technical difficulties.

Read more at https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.planetary.org%2Fsci-...

My first job was developing in C on a Sco Unix server (yeah, those bastards). Within a year we had totally switched over to Redhat. We were a small shop, but I bet that happened all over once Linux became stable enough. So while commercial Unix may not ever be "dead", I think linux sure as heck put it on life support.