Christopher Michel

Just discovering that painter Isabella Kirkland has a whole series on my favorite sea creature -- nudibranchs! www.isabellakirkland.com/collections/...

Thank you @christophermichel.com 😊 🙌

Wonderfully inspiring by @francesarnold.bsky.social cen.acs.org/people/award... @nationalacademies.org

Imagine standing on Io. Jupiter hangs enormous in a black sky. The ground is stained yellow with sulfur, broken by dark lava flows. This is the place Caltech Prof Katherine de Kleer studies. More: explorers.com/katherine-de... @caltech.edu @nationalacademies.org

“Publicly funded research belongs to all of us.” @aratip.bsky.social led DARPA, NIST, and the White House science office. Now she is defending the public commitment to research, and what it means for democracy. My portrait and her story: explorers.com/arati-prabha... @nationalacademies.org

Space is the intersection of our imagination and science. Those who seek it always get more rewarded than they expect. Keep looking up.

After 30 years at JPL, Kareem Badaruddin volunteered for one of the toughest jobs in space exploration: keeping Voyager 1 and 2 alive. Nearly 50 years after launch, these aging spacecraft are still sending messages home from billions of miles away. explorers.com/kareem-badar... @nasajpl.bsky.social

Alone on a faraway beach. White water over dark sand, wind off the sea, the horizon lost in fog. Hard not to think of a dear friend who would have found a whole world in these few shades of gray, and made a more beautiful photograph of it.

Coastal California.

Les Éditions du Désastre. How long must we stand at the end before it becomes the beginning?

“So much mystery now finally seems on the brink of elucidation.” @deisseroth.bsky.social, awarded the 2026 @nobelprize.org in Medicine. After years of photographing Karl, I’m so happy to see this day. His story and downloadable portraits: explorers.com/karl-deisser...

Where the Cypress Fall. Fallen limbs hold their old twists, pale against the dark earth. There is something tender about this place, the way the forest keeps its dead. #SeaRanch #Photography

Join me for a walk? The fog is caught in the trees at Sea Ranch, and a little light still reaches the grass. We can take our time. I love how much there is to notice here, how a familiar path can feel different when you give it your full attention.

M42, the Orion Nebula, through a little fog at Sea Ranch.

Bob Pappalardo is the project scientist for NASA’s Europa Clipper, now crossing the solar system toward Jupiter. explorers.com/robert-pappa...

Congratulations to #NASmembers Karl Deisseroth and Peter Hegemann on receiving the 2026 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine! They are honored alongside Georg Nagel for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics. Left photo by @christophermichel.com

Dr @deisseroth.bsky.social is a remarkable writer and a devoted physician. Today, he's a @nobelprize.org laureate. Congratulations, Karl! Photographed for New Heroes. Portrait and story: explorers.com/karl-deisser... @nationalacademies.org @nasonline.org

Robert Reich has spent more than fifty years asking a simple question: Who is the economy actually working for? I had the great pleasure of making his portrait in Berkeley. explorers.com/robert-reich/ @rbreich.bsky.social

Isn't this pic a stunner!? We at CICLOPS made a video of this flyby that blew everyone away. Check it out! ciclops.org/s3.amazonaws... Caption: ciclops.org/view/3803/Fl... Enjoy!! 🧪📰🛰️

Scott Bolton, principal investigator of NASA’s Juno mission, helped send a spacecraft to Jupiter. When they arrived, the planet confounded expectations. More: explorers.com/scott-bolton/ @swri.org @nationalacademies.org @nasajpl.bsky.social

Hot Havana afternoons seem to stretch forever.

People I admire: Mack Tilling. Mack’s Finest Gelato in Park City is getting a reputation as the nation’s best gelato. If you’re in Park City, stop by Mack’s Finest on Bonanza Drive. One spoonful and you’ll understand what all the fuss is about.

Tony Hawk, in a rare moment of stillness. I grew up watching him make the impossible look almost casual. Decades later, he’s still pushing, still skating, still unmistakably himself. explorers.com/tony-hawk/

Melancholia on the Moscow subway. Everyone together, everyone somewhere else. A whole carriage of people moving through the dark, each caught inside their own small world.

I’m deeply inspired by the kick-ass engineers at @nasajpl.bsky.social. If you can imagine it, they can build it. Autumn Lui stands in front of a model of the MoonFall moon drone. A machine for a place with no air, no easy footing, and no room for mistakes. More explorers.com/autumn-lui/

In the footsteps of Feynman. John Preskill at Caltech, where he holds the Richard P. Feynman Professorship of Theoretical Physics. Preskill arrived at Caltech in 1983 and knew Feynman during their years together on the faculty. More: explorers.com/john-preskill/ @nationalacademies.org

One cool cat. @astroengine.bsky.social, space scientist turned science storyteller at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And yes, the Deep Space Optical Communications shirt is entirely appropriate. @nasajpl.bsky.social

If you want to get your robot into space, Keyur Patel is the guy. He’s spent more than four decades at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory figuring out how to make extraordinarily difficult missions actually work. More: explorers.com/keyur-patel/ @nasajpl.bsky.social @nationalacademies.org

Jonathan Keats photographed at The Interval at the @longnow.org Artist, philosopher, and professional provocateur, Keats has spent years making us think differently about time, technology, civilization, and what it means to be human.

John Dabiri studies the physics of motion, from jellyfish and schooling fish to wind turbines and the human heart. A Caltech engineer, MacArthur Fellow and National Medal of Science recipient, finding engineering ideas hidden in nature. explorers.com/john-dabiri/ @nationalacademies.org @caltech.edu

Such a pleasure to meet you, Chris! And a fun challenge to show scientists without the lab coat, microscope, and serious scientist stare 😉 to show a fragment of our lives beyond our experiments! I hope we managed to capture a little of the people behind the science.

How do we picture a scientist? Lab coat. Microscope. Fluorescent light. Developmental biologist @zernickagoetz.bsky.social wanted to step outside that shorthand. Rigorous and elegant. Exacting and visual. A scientist, yes, but never only that. explorers.com/how-do-we-pi... @nationalacademies.org

Magdalena Żernicka Goetz studies the first moments of life, how cells organize, choose their roles, and begin building an embryo. She sees detail, structure and beauty everywhere. It shows in the science, too. @caltech.edu @nationalacademies.org

John Grotzinger helped lead Curiosity’s search for ancient habitability on Mars. He showed up for our Caltech portrait session on a homemade bicycle carrying a model rover wheel. Perfect. Portrait + story: explorers.com/john-grotzin...

Keyur Patel has spent more than 40 years turning distant worlds into destinations, helping guide Voyager, Deep Impact and Dawn. I photographed him at JPL beside the spacecraft he helped save. @nationalacademies.org explorers.com/keyur-patel/

Keeping the Voyagers alive has become an extraordinary act of engineering care. Their power comes from the heat of decaying plutonium, and each spacecraft loses about four watts every year. JPL's Suzanne Dodd and Kareem Badaruddin are helping make those choices. More: explorers.com/keeping-voya...

.@rpappalardo.bsky.social leads Europa Clipper science at NASA JPL. An ocean waits. More: explorers.com/robert-pappa... @nationalacademies.org

Autumn Lui is helping direct one of JPL’s audacious ideas: MoonFall, a proposed mission using rocket powered drones to leap across the lunar South Pole, map future Artemis terrain, and search permanently shadowed craters for water ice. explorers.com/autumn-lui @nationalacademies.org

Somewhere beyond the familiar, the world loses its edges. Union Glacier, Antarctica.

Nobel laureate Carol Greider moved to Santa Cruz, took up surfing, and became a beginner again. I love that. She discovered telomerase. Now she is learning the Pacific. Portrait from the New Heroes project. explorers.com/carol-greider/ @nationalacademies.org

The sea keeps no time

George Church once said, “It’s all too easy to dismiss the future. People confuse what’s impossible today with what’s impossible tomorrow." A pioneer of genomics, synthetic biology, and genome engineering, always working a few steps ahead. explorers.com/george-church/ @nationalacademies.org