Danny Robb

60 years ago, the Lunar Orbiter team took the first photograph of the Earth from the Moon. You'll often see the restoration by LOIRP, but I actually prefer the original, with all the artifacts of the image-creation process. Here's the story of Frame 102, mostly told through images: #histSTM 🗃️🔭

How could Bluesky's upcoming spaces feature (a bit like communities) be useful to the astronomy community? 🔭☄️ Someone other than me should make one for astro PhD students. Someone should also make one for LGBTQ+ astronomers. I wonder what else?

Mario Jurić is announcing a possible dwarf planet, 2026 ED138, discovered by @rubinobservatory.org right now at www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RVO...

Meet our Solar System's newest dwarf planet candidate: 2026 ED138! Orbiting past Pluto, scientists found it in NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory data from earlier this year. Early analysis suggests it's ~600–1500 km across, one of the largest found past Neptune!🔭🧪 🔗: rubinobservatory.org/news/rubin-f...

🔭 Rosetta's Selfie Credit: ESA/Rosetta/Philae/CIVA ap261024

For spooky season, here's one of my favorite scientific illustrations: this goofy bat by Carl Linnaeus. #histsci 🗃️ #SciArt

In the 17th c., scientific publications were filled with "reports of monsters, strange weather, and other singularities," D+G write. 🧵 Good BHL post covering one example - Gaspar Schott's Physica Curiosa: blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2013/05/monsters-scientific-revolution-and #histsci 🗃️ #SciArt

"I can never get pants that fit."

New Study: Human Exploration Across the Moon | via @nationalacademies.org - nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/294...

On its way to Jupiter, the European JUICE mission recently flew by the Earth & Moon, viewing them as we would explore another planetary system. It's fun to step back and think how strange we'd seem if studied up close for the first time. 🧪🔭 www.dlr.de/en/latest/ne...

Fun thing! I'm looking at a copy of a book of summaries of Aristotle’s natural philosophy (Naturalis totius philosophiae paraphrases (1538)), and the book has a semi-circle mirror set into the backboard. Has any one seen this elsewhere? What's going on? A device to connect up with the Aristotle?

The many moods of MMX, from JAXA's imagery archive.

🌕 Big missions aren't the only way to discover the Moon. Through the Moon Explore initiative, @esa.int is developing a new generation of smaller, faster missions to investigate the lunar environment and its resources. 🔗 Find out more: www.esa.int/Science_Expl...

Rejected Space Mission Profiles xkcd.com/3310/

My favourite bit of reporting for this story was finding out ISS astronauts were growing little gardens in their quarters in secret—and only this summer have NASA explicitly permitted them to do this. Astronauts are, in many ways, just regular, hopeful humans. 🌱

Re-reading Objectivity by Daston+Galison. Was always curious about images that didn’t make it into the book. This time I’m looking them up (and looking deeper into some that did make it). Keeping a log of them as I go, and figured I would share. First up, Decamps vs Civiale: #histsci 🗃️ #SciArt 🧵

Centaur delays caused a big headache for Surveyor planners, and contributed to the decision to spin off Lunar Orbiter. Among the many engineering problems may have been a more human one: lack of enthusiasm

So my book now has a cover, featuring one of my favorite archival images. Forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2027!

So, lets see what this object is after all these years...place your bets :) (for the uninitiated, one camp thinks it's an Lockheed Electra, yes THAT L-10 Electra of a certain Mrs. Earhart, others think not so much..) Source: www.archaeologychannel.org/taraia/ More: heritagetac.org/programs/tar...

My (and Jean's) take on the Physics Nobel announcement last week: #histsci #envhist #envhum #STS #Antarctica theconversation.com/physics-nobe...

As expected, the Prime Minister's promise to sort out the mess of funding for Jodrell actually meant nothing - it seems the government would like it to be some sort of heritage theme park when you can go and see where we used to do science. 🔭

Interesting insights by @drspacejunk.bsky.social

genuinely one of the most important people of the 20th century -- not just pioneer, not just moon landing programmer, but also a programmer on the project that first discovered chaos in the 1950s

The Apollo guidance code that Margaret Hamilton led is available online! It was scanned and shared openly. Her legacy will live on in the fundamentals of software engineering that she created that still form the basis for software design for many space missions. github.com/chrislgarry/...

On October 7, 1959, Luna 3 gave us our first look at the far side of the Moon. Today, NASA released the preliminary science reports from Artemis II. Reposting my visual history of lunar far side exploration, which I wrote while watching Artemis II: 🗃️🔭 #histSTM invertingvision.com/2026/04/06/e...