In BAN Issue 797, I wrote about how the election went — disastrously was the word I used, and if anything I’d use stronger language now that we know the Republicans kept the House, and now run all three branches of the government.

Despair is an easy thing to fall back on right now. I feel it, certainly, and I know a lot of my friends do, too. It feels hopeless, but that’s not the case. It wasn’t hopeless in 2016 and it’s not now. It’s bad, oh my yes, but there’s still ways to resist.

A reader sent me a link to the Waging Nonviolence site, which has an essay called, “10 ways to be prepared and grounded now that Trump has won”. It has excellent advice on what to do, from trusting yourself (literally the first thing) to examples of nonviolent acts of protest both subtle and overt.

Yes, I know Trump and his bootlicking cronies will act however they can to squash protest, legally or otherwise, but that doesn’t mean we cannot do anything. I don’t plan on doing anything illegal, of course, and I would never urge anyone else to do so in this newsletter. But that doesn’t mean our hands are entirely tied. The essay lays that out, and is worth a solid read.

I’ll add that I got a few hate letters — and I do mean hate — from people who disagreed with my position in that earlier issue. All of them told me to stay in my lane and stick to astronomy, which I find as equally irritating as amusing. Irritating for obvious reasons — I am a human being, a realm of ends as Kant put it, and contain multitudes just as each of us does. Telling someone to limit themself to one narrow thing dehumanizes them.

The amusing part is a bit dark, but nevertheless makes me chuckle. In this newsletter I write about astronomy, certainly, but also math, jokes, recipes, music, my dogs, birds, scifi, and even the odd short story or two. These folks never complain about those, yet those topics definitely stray from the astronomy-only definition. Weird they only complain about politics, and even only then when I disagree with them. If I posted about how awesome MAGA is, I’d bet a year’s paycheck those same folks would praise me for my brave stance among lib scientists.

There is never a time to shut up about politics, and now is very definitely not the time to do so. I will continue to speak up, because I, my friends, my family, my country, and countless people I don’t know and never will are at risk of losing their rights and their lives.

Stick to my lane? The Universe is my lane, pal. That includes this corner of it.

On November 1, 2024, the amazing NEOWISE mission ended when the spacecraft re-entered Earth’s atmosphere and burned up. NEOWISE, neé WISE (the Wide-field infrared Survey Explorer) provided decades of observations of the entire sky in infrared, watching comets, asteroids, and literally 200 billion other sources. Like JWST, it is sensitive to emission from dust in our galaxy, so the images it provided were pretty incredible.

I’ve written about them many, many times; but with the mission’s end NASA has put up a wonderful site with a selection of some amazing ones, including ones never seen before by the public. It’s well worth your time to peruse them; for example take a look at the California Nebula:

This is a huge cloud of gas and dust around 100 light-years across, easily visible in even short photos of the sky near the Pleiades. The dust is made up of PAHs, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are complex carbon-based molecules, which are displayed as green here. Red is cooler dust, lit up by the star Menkib seen in the middle of that ruddy cloud. The structure you can see in the image is amazing, as is the field of view; this image is about 4.4 x 5.8 degrees in size! The full moon is 0.5°, so this is a huge amount of celestial real estate.

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