Tootfinder

Stumbled across my old NeXT "floptical" disc while looking through old boxes at the office! I've been wondering where this had gone for a few decades now: I have archives of most of my files from 1992 (when we founded Omni) through the present, but this was where I had archived my active files for several of the years prior.
Now to see if any of our NeXT cubes still has a working magneto-optical drive that can read this data…

Constraints on Quaoar's rings and atmosphere from JWST/NIRCam observations of a stellar occultation
Benjamin Proudfoot, Bryan Holler, Ko Arimatsu, Flavia Rommel, Cameron Collyer, Estela Fern\'andez-Valenzuela
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07898

Constraints on Quaoar's rings and atmosphere from JWST/NIRCam observations of a stellar occultation
Observations of stellar occultations have revealed that small bodies are capable of hosting ring systems. The trans-Neptunian object (TNO) Quaoar, is the host of an enigmatic ring system, with two rings located well-outside the Roche limit. To better understand these structures, we observed a stellar occultation by Quaoar and its rings using the James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) NIRCam instrument. Our observations detect both known rings, although Q2R -- the inner known ring -- is not detecte…

Applying Vision Transformers on Spectral Analysis of Astronomical Objects
Luis Felipe Strano Moraes, Ignacio Becker, Pavlos Protopapas, Guillermo Cabrera-Vives
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00294

Applying Vision Transformers on Spectral Analysis of Astronomical Objects
We apply pre-trained Vision Transformers (ViTs), originally developed for image recognition, to the analysis of astronomical spectral data. By converting traditional one-dimensional spectra into two-dimensional image representations, we enable ViTs to capture both local and global spectral features through spatial self-attention. We fine-tune a ViT pretrained on ImageNet using millions of spectra from the SDSS and LAMOST surveys, represented as spectral plots. Our model is evaluated on key task…