Notices by Mark McCaughrean (markmccaughrean@mastodon.social)

The mindless cognitive dissonance in the US budget proposal for NASA is off-scale.

Saying MSR is grossly over budget & then claiming the same goals can be achieved by human* missions to Mars … 🙄

Sure, the point is to give all the money to Crown Prince Elmo, but if anyone thinks a human mission to Mars isn’t going to be hugely more expensive & also overrun massively … 🤑

The proposed budget cuts to NASA are ignorant vandalism.

*Evidently only men need apply.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal-Year-2026-Discretionary-Budget-Request.pdf

My US space science colleagues have my deep sympathy – if even only a fraction of this gets through a supine Congress, US science will suffer immensely. Look at the budget cuts proposed to the NSF as well.

And many of the NASA missions on the chopping block incl MSR, Gateway, ISS extension, & likely Roman have ESA participation & therefore this entails major disruptions to ESA & lots of nugatory spending.

Which of course would be seen as a good thing by the isolationist nationalist US regime.

@morph Likewise – I was surprised that it worked without seeming too strange 🙂

Variations on a theme.

I took this picture of my son in one of the side aisles of the Romanesque cathedral in Speyer this afternoon ⛪️

He prefers the colour version; I like the monochrome one. For fun, I’ve added two more, one with a gradient in saturation, another with just him picked out in colour.

Let me know which you prefer 🙂🤷♂️

#Photography 📷
#iPhonePhotography 📱

I'm saddened to have just heard the news that Svetlana Gerasimenko passed away last week, on 8 April.

She was the co-discoverer in 1969 of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko with fellow Ukrainian astronomer, Klim Churyumov (1937-2016).

This is the comet that was explored by ESA's Rosetta spacecraft from 2014-2016 & landed on by the Philae probe in November 2014.

A comet & events that changed my life 🙇♂️

Ad astra, Svetlana ✨

#SpaceScience

Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor lay out the existential danger 99.9% of us face from the Christo-fascist billionaire class.

They are not only willing to see the world burn, but their wealth & power derives from accelerating its demise.

They have no interest in your survival, only their own, freed of any obligation to care about others.

Klein & Taylor propose a different path to surviving the crises we face: together, for all humans & for all life on our home planet 🌍

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/13/end-times-fascism-far-right-trump-musk

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but it seems to come up in my life weekly:

1. NASA images *are not* in the public domain;

2. They *are* generally free to use for most non-commercial, educational, & informational purposes without permission, but acknowledgement of NASA is needed (which true PD would not require);

3. For commercial use, no endorsement by NASA can be implied;

4. Images featuring people, e.g. astronauts, need explicit permission for commercial use.

https://www.nasa.gov/nasa-brand-center/images-and-media/

Still one of the coolest machines ever built.

Ending the shuttle programme felt to me the same way grounding Concorde did. Both gone, but in many ways, unsurpassed.

I know all the arguments about cost, safety, & govt vs private. I also know that we absolutely have more pressing concerns in the world than human spaceflight & supersonic jet liners.

But still ...

OV-105 as seen from the ISS on 9 December 2000, ISS-001-E-4571

Wow – didn’t think I’d be in tears today, but this message sent home from Gaia as it was shut down forever today hits hard 😭

What you’re seeing is a map of the 106 CCD detectors that Gaia used to measure the positions of billions of stars in the Milky Way for the past 11 years 🛰️✨

They were turned off in a special sequence … 😕

#SpaceScience #Astronomy #Science

And if the article is to believed, this amendment is based on wolves “wasting” 14 million tonnes of meat from 14,000 animals.

Quite apart from the fact that the wolves are actually eating most of that meat, not wasting it, it suggests the average cow & sheep weighs 1,000kg.

Which is equally stupid – the average cow is more like 500kg & a sheep perhaps 50-100kg.

How this passed a parliament is beyond me.

Here are the numbers for Castilla y Leon:

1.47 million cows in 2020

https://www.statista.com/statistics/765409/cabin-spanish-from-bovine-by-community-autonomous-in-spain/#:~:text=The%20livestock%20of%20bovine%20cattle,highest%20number%20of%20cattle%20heads

2.7 million sheep in 2020

https://www.ine.es/en/prensa/cea_2020_en.pdf

From that second document, the cow & sheep population in all of Spain in 2020 was 22.8 million.

The claimed loss to wolves is 14,000, so 0.06%.

It’s utterly pathetic to use turn these tiny numbers even if true to overturn a hunting ban on wolves & just goes to show how anti-nature farmers & hunters can be, despite their contrary protestations.

There are more than 4 million cows & sheep in Castilla y Leon in Spain.

If the claimed annual loss of 6,000 livestock to wolves is true, that’s 0.15%, well within any operational margins & easily covered by insurance or compensation.

But sure, go ahead & pass a bill that threatens the extinction of wolves all over again.

Because if you want to know what a truly bloodthirsty animal that kills for fun looks like, don’t point at wolves.

It’s us.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/20/spanish-parliament-vote-on-cutting-food-waste-will-end-ban-on-wolf-hunting

So, science friends.

When in the 1930s would you have decided “no, I’m not going to go to that conference in Germany”?

Because the question now needs to be posed looking westwards across the Atlantic.

If your phone can be taken on arrival & searched for messages critical of the government & then you can be denied entry (or perhaps worse in the future), why would you even think of going in the first place?

Absolutely horrifying slide into totalitarianism.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/trump-musk-french-scientist-detained

We may not have been able to see yesterday’s total lunar eclipse here in central Europe, but I’ll take tonight’s Moon as a compensation 🌝

Good night everyone & remember that we are all just ephemeral refugees from the same cosmic recycling bin ✨🗑️

#Astronomy 🔭
#Photography 📷
#iPhonePhotography 📱

Another nice evening glimpse of #Mercury & #Venus in the dusk sky, this time looking west along the Neckar from the Alte Brücke in #Heidelberg.

Venus is brighter to the upper right; Mercury is along a diagonal to the left & down from there, just above the thin clouds.

As seen near the end of today’s 55km cycle – sunny & warm for early March, but chilling rapidly after sunset. I also found some Bärlauch (wild garlic) out towards Ladenburg 😋

#CyclingLife 🚴♂️
#Astronomy ✨
#Photography 📷

A nice view of Mercury, the innermost planet in our solar system, between Venus & the city lights of Mannheim on this early spring evening 🌚

As seen from 566m elevation atop the Teltschikturm on the Schriesheimer Kopf above Wilhelmsfeld in the Odenwald 🌲🌲🌲

Despite the murk, I was able to follow it down to <1° above the horizon.

Better DSLR photos to follow 🙂👍

#Astronomy ✨
#Photography 📷
#iPhonePhotography 📱

Big day here in Germany, with a pivotal federal election underway: my wife is working at local polling station.

Although I can’t vote as a non-citizen resident, I feel the tension. It’s unbelievable that the far-right have become so strong in this country of all countries: the barely concealed admiration of the Nazis by the AfD & frequent “unintentional” reference to their symbols is shocking.

I hope the warning signs from across the Atlantic & elsewhere work, but …

#Bundestagswahl2025

A very pretty conjunction between the Moon & Venus in clear cold skies this evening 🙂

There was some excellent earthshine to be seen, sunlight reflected off the Atlantic lighting up the otherwise dark part of the Moon 🌒

And it was easy to see that Venus was a crescent, with sunlight striking it in pretty much the same as it was hitting the Moon 🌙

Wide-field: iPhone 📱
Close-ups: DSLR + 200m lens 📷

#Astronomy #SpaceScience #PlanetParade #Photography #iPhonePhotography #Nikon

West Germany vs East Germany – what a difference 35 years makes 😬

Perhaps as predicted, but still, this map of the second vote in yesterday’s German election is pretty startling.

The former West goes almost completely conservative right (even my Heidelberg, a Green redoubt, wtf?), while the former communist East goes almost full fascist.

The places not following those trends bear discussion too: Kaiserslautern, Gelsenkirchen, East Berlin, Hamburg etc.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/feb/23/german-election-2025-results-in-full-live

Coming up in 100 minutes at 21:48CET: the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter mission is making flyby at Venus, just 379km above the cloud tops.

Although it has made several Venus flybys before, this one's special: it's the first of a sequence designed to lift the spacecraft out of the ecliptic plane.

Why? Because Solar Orbiter is aiming to take the first clear images of the north & south poles of the Sun.

Will there be a polar hexagon like on Saturn? Stay tuned 🌞

https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Operations/Solar_Orbiter_ready_for_close_encounter_with_Venus

#SpaceScience