Viewing profile — wthomp

This is maybe not the place, but we did some apples to apples comparisons between PyMC, Dynesty, and the Julia Turing.jl package. A little to my surprise, despite being a Julia fan…

I visited the Large binocular telescope just a month or two ago. A very impressive facility, and one can only imagine the image quality if they were captured using both mirrors coh…

That doesn’t seem to match what I understood from the article. At one point they say explicitly that it will enable brighter displays.

My understanding is that the AO system for GMT is going to pose quite a challenge. A big topic of ongoing research is dealing with “petaling” where the separate primary mirrors in …

There’s a bit more to it than that. GMT is further along but its design has many compromises versus TMT. Also, a second ELT in the southern hemisphere is less useful than one in bo…

Worth mentioning that essentially all professional astronomers / astrophysicists consider this person a grifter. It’s amazing that he keeps getting so much press though, would love…

Yes exactly. Which means it's extremely, extremely low. Even though the probably of a meteorite hitting somewhere is high, the probability of hitting somewhere in particular is tin…

I’m using this from Julia and both the user and developer experience is great. It’s much more limited than publication style plotting libraries but the instant 60fps reactivity is …

#3 spot at atmospheric pressure

Coming from matplotlib, I found Makie such a breath of fresh air. The API is just as (if not more) flexible but way more predictable. Their layout system in particular is amazing. …

As has been pointed out elsewhere, this is the first image of our galaxy in something other than light (radio, infrared, x rays, gamma rays are all photons).

Would you mind explaining this further? Since sound is literally pressure waves, I don't understand how reducing sound can still leave "sound pressure".

This is not a “nature publication” in the common sense. It’s in their commentary section.

This is true but the poster above doesn’t mean Monte Carlo integration. Rather, testing those methods on simulations from generative models.

Small correction, no one will be able to pay for time on JWST. But if you put in a proposal for time and it's accepted, they will pay you . That's to make sure there is sufficient …

If you were to fly into these nebula in some kind of spaceship they wouldn't be any brighter than they appear in the night sky from Earth. They would just look way way bigger. The …

This is really impressive, and a great write up. I’ve been following the work on static compiling Julia to x86 libraries from the GPUCompiler.jl folks but I didn’t expect to see Ju…

As others have mentioned, this is similar to how the event horizon telescope works today! However, there’s no free lunch. By using arrays of telescopes instead of a single filled d…

No, unfortunately those measurements have to be taken at the same time. That said, as the Earth rotates the distance between any two pairs of antennas changes which can be used to …

For those wondering if we could get sharper images with JWST, here’s the previously imaged black hole (same angular size as our own) compared to a single pixel from Hubble’s wide f…

Unfortunately JWST won’t come close to being able to resolve Sgr A*. They measured its diameter in micro-arcseconds, whereas JWST’s limiting resolution will be measured in 10s-100s…

For mercury, the L1 and L2 points would be closer to the planet.

Many circumstellar disks have been detected, but this is the first unambiguous detection of a circumplanetary disk. This is believed to be material swirling around a protoplanet, a…

The diffraction limit is the fundamental resolution limit of a telescope. This is the size of "spot" that will be created on the camera sensor for a single point of light like a st…