Father, husband, scientist, @AucklandUni prof, Kiwi diaspora returnee.' We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.' He/him.
Mar 31, 2022 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Speaking as an astrophysicist, O'Connor is dead wrong here. Almost no astronomers regularly refer to the Pleiades with its Messier number; it's a double gotcha -- you think you have caught someone, but you've actually caught yourself...
The Messier catalogue was drawn up (surprise, surprise) by a guy called Messier (Charles Messier, in fact) in the 1770s. He loved hunting for comets, and comets are little fuzzy blobs in the sky. So he made a list of other little fuzzy blobs in the sky that are NOT comets /2
Sep 5, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
On top of everything else, many young people do not "choose" conversion therapy, they have it forced upon them, and it does real harm. By skating over this, Elers has critically misrepresented the issue.
I have a deep commitment to academic freedom, but for me this raises issues of competence as much as content. Elers' column goes out of its way to mock a young person who has taken a public stance on a challenging topic
Dec 31, 2019 • 20 tweets • 11 min read
The smoke from a continent scale fire disaster has crossed the sea -- New Zealand Twitter is flooded with images of orange skies above the South Island, and the smoke shows clearly in this view from space... 1/N
Like this one 2/N
