Things were rockin' and rollin' at APO last night! We felt a 5.5 magnitude earthquake centered south of Carlsbad - check the telescope telemetry data that shows the movement! Photo courtesy of @ajlemma 🤩 earthquake.usgs.gov/earthqua…

Behold! Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, Venus (at left), and our fabulous 3.5m telescope 🤩 Photo courtesy of Observing Specialist Mark Croom.

Beautiful aurora from APO tonight!!!

We caught the Starliner coming in for a landing at White Sands using our all-sky camera! It's the streak in the southwest corner (lower right) of each frame. Thanks for sharing these ⁦@ajlemma⁩ !

Did you hear about the fireball over the Philippines yesterday due to a 1m size asteroid impacting Earth?! The object 2024 RW1 was discovered by @catalina_sky and subsequently imaged by @bryce_bolin and C. Ingebretsen, with help from @ajlemma and V. Sutherland, using APO! ☄️🤩

A rare sighting of all of our amazing 3.5m observing specialists in one place! Thanks to everyone for being there for the exciting training session on APOLLO operations. Pew pew!!! 💚

We had a great eyepiece viewing session for the ARC Board and SDSS AC meeting attendees! Thanks to @ARedheadOfVenus and @ajlemma for the wonderful sky tour!

Case in point: @AstronomerBill split his time this week between #APOSS21 and summer shutdown engineering tasks!

Did you know that the upper atmosphere of the Sun emits extra light at certain wavelengths (or colors)? We can measure this excess emission with ARCES on the APO 3.5 m telescope.

We’ve gotten creative with our training procedures for new observers on the 3.5m. Thanks to @ARedheadOfVenus for leading the virtual tour and orienting this group of trainees to the telescope!

Can you spot the difference? 👀💫 White dwarf stars can be smaller than planets, so a transiting planet can completely block out a white dwarf's light, like in the picture on the right from a recent observing run done with the 3.5m at APO.(3)

Keaton Bell(@astrokeat) is an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow, and a DIRAC Institute Fellow at the University of Washington Astronomy Department! Here you see him at his improvised quarantine work station, observing remotely at APO for the night from Seattle(1)

We are thankful for the splendid weather on Tuesday night, which allowed Emma Dahl(@dahlek88), Astronomy PhD candidate and NASA MUREP fellow at New Mexico State University, to have a successful observing run of Jupiter on the 3.5m at APO! (1/3)

Who needs a car wash when we have @AstronomerBill to carefully wash our secondary mirror? This sequence shows him wetting it and adding soap, cleaning extra-dirty parts with pure cotton, rinsing with pure water, drying with purified high pressure air,and voila...our sparkling M2!