Free Astronomy Magazine – July-August 2025 Issue Available For Reading And Download

Above: Combined MeerKAT and James Webb Space Telescope images. The star-forming region Sagittarius C, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, is about 200 light-years from the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*. Huge vertical filamentary structures in the MeerKAT radio data echo those Webb captured on a smaller scale, in infrared, in a blue-green hydrogen cloud. Astronomers think the strong magnetic fields in the heart of the galaxy are shaping the filaments. For Webb, color is assigned by shifting the infrared spectrum to visible light colors. The shortest infrared wavelengths are bluer, and the longer wavelengths appear more red. NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, SARAO, Samuel Crow

The most recent issue of Free Astronomy Magazine (July-August 2025) is available for your reading and downloading pleasure in English, Italian, Spanish, French, and Arabic at www.astropublishing.com (and facebook).

Back with a cover story by our fearless leader Michele Ferrara concerning the ever-present desire by some scientists (OK, effectively all scientists) to be the very first to the gate in making a major discovery. In this case, Nikku Madhusudhan of Cambridge, with his group's publication at https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.05566, followed soon-ish after by https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13407, a follow-up to be found at https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12267, and more digestible variations of recent re-assessments at such places as https://www.straitstimes.com/world/doubt-cast-on-claim-of-hints-of-life-on-faraway-planet.

That said, given how long it takes to get time on major facilities to obtain this data, how well the astronomical community (but certainly not the twitter/X-verse) is at tempering such studies with significant follow-up assessments of the same data, and the fact that such a somewhat early claim and the associated press are among the few reasons why the community outside of the astronomical community are aware of the amazing work done by, for instance, the JWST teams, we will all likely continue to let such cycles cycle until someone lands on that particular gold mine.

Free Astronomy Magazine – May-June 2025 Issue Available For Reading And Download

Above: A highly cropped view of RCW 38, featured in an ESO article in the current issue, and which I'll need to plan a trip far south to ever see for myself. Image from https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2503/.

The most recent issue of Free Astronomy Magazine (May-June 2025) is available for your reading and downloading pleasure in English, Italian, Spanish, French, and Arabic at www.astropublishing.com (and facebook).

Another edition heavy on content provided by major astronomical observatories and agencies (original content still in the works). As always, an excellent collection and afternoon read.

We hear/read a lot about the recent feats of the James Webb Space Telescope, from which is remain warming (just slightly, in the interest of detector sensitivity) to read how the data from Hubble Space Telescope continues to complement the science and analysis being performed by Webb, such as in the NASA articles "Webb peers deeper into mysterious Flame Nebula" and "Webb exposes complex atmosphere of starless super-Jupiter."

Empty Thunderbird Mail Filter Content Box Leads To Any Emails Containing Hyphens In The Username Being Deleted

Above: Barely-related eye candy but the best pic from searching for a header. From www.publicdomainpictures.net

Posted here just in case you've experienced similar and are searching for a reason why. And now a defect on Bugzilla! And now I wonder how long I've been deleting such emails.

As part of the prep work for posting Design Of A Molecular Field Effect Transistor (mFET) – Links And Commentary to ArXiv (still to do), I set up an account and received emails back from e-prints@arxiv.org concerning that setup. Then I went to apply my evening Mail Filters to clean up all my inboxes.

And that's when it all started.

The registration e-prints@arxiv.org email went poof. Not moved to Trash, not moved to some other folder, just gone from Thunderbird (as of OS X v. 128) – and still sitting on my iPhone, so I know it was still on the server somewhere.

After clearing out the relevant inbox and re-downloading all of the mail on the server, the e-prints@arxiv.org email was back in Thunderbird – and the search within the Mail Filters for the reason was afoot.

The offending situation is shown below for a demo filter. After a lengthy search, I found one filter that contained an empty content block. Deletion of this empty block left the e-prints@arxiv.org email alone in the inbox.

Yes, a mis-setup on my part, but I suspect not an uncommon mistake. Reported to Thunderbird developers…

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1956392

… who then linked it to an old bug that I missed on search of their list.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391717

Still the best email client out there, esp. when your MBP dies and you've no alternative to Apple Mail on your Ubuntu box (dragging your entire mail folder onto another OS, opening Thunderbird, and being back in business is a massive relief). Know it's on their radar and your/my dumb mistake will someday not lead to a similar outcome.