When you gaze into the night sky on a clear night, it is enchanting, immense, and awe-inspiring – the universe outside, but right inside you, there is also an enchanting, immense, and awe-inspiring universe of your soul – let your light shine! (short video here)

Dr. Maria Stone

aka Your Astronomer from Helsinki

Tune in to LIVE events

Tune in this summer 2025 to LIVE events with me. I hold weekly discussion chats about traveling in Helsinki on Fridays 11:00 EEST . I also hold occasional special events, such as LIVE poetry reading, special holiday occasions in Helsinki, and more. 

Featured past event

Friday Lunch Weekly Tips on Helsinki Travel

 

 My LIVE session stream was featured in the “Helsinki Day” celebrations in 2025.

Amazon Author Page

I have published poetry collections, a children’s book, and more. Often illustrated with original drawings. I hope my books bless readers.

Dr. Maria B. Stone

Dr. Maria B. Stone

Helsinki writer and astronomer

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Invite me to a virtual seminar (free)

My Goals

  • My aspiration in astronomy is to make a ground-breaking discovery, which is largely a gift from God to pierce into the mystery of Universe and does not depend on anything else, but I can take reasonable steps to be ready.
  • I hope to contribute meaningfully to the community.
  • Financially, my goal is to have 2000$/month (estimate).
  • I aim to be there for my family and not let the career steal from family time (aka work/life balance).

Research Interests

  • Evolution of galaxies
  • Environments around AGN-host galaxies
  • SMBH-host galaxy correlations at different redshifts
PhD Thesis

Thesis can be downloaded here

Turku – the City that hosted my PhD

Turku sounds a lot like "Turkey" to my ears (and pretty much to everyone I knew before coming to Finland), but is not the same place. In fact, Turku is the ancient capital of Finland. I found myself in that city in my chase for my dream career of astronomy research....

You can easily glimpse at galaxies in the sky from your computer!

I wrote an article about how to do this from the convenience of your computer in this blog post a while ago. You can find many various types of galaxies - near and far, galaxies of various shapes, colors, with spiral arms, and more. Here are a few examples of various...

Stay motivated with three tips – Say Yes to You ! (if feeling unappreciated at work as an early career researcher)

1. Continue to apply for funding and career growth opportunities even if discouraged by senior researchers who love pointing out any deficiencies in your CV (while overlooking such deficiencies in their protégés :D).I made that mistake one year, as someone I trusted...

Three points about my #PhD experience

I was going through some of my old shorts on #YouTube and stumbled on some PhD-related ones. So I decided to write up a short blog post to share the wisdom with the world, hoping to inspire and to prepare aspiring PhD candidates. My experience and record are as...

Galaxy Cluster

#Galaxies typically are part of a larger aggregation of galaxies, not just floating on their own. While I finished my #PhD #Astronomy and am grateful for it, I did not secure yet (almost a year) a job in my #Dream #career where I invested decades and even those darn...

Something special about being a local author

There is something special about being a local author.  I recently realized that I am a local author. I guess every author (or artist or scientist) is associated to some locality, so they are by definition also a local author. I don't know what it entails because I am...

Igniting the ginormous black holes in galaxies

We are sitting in one of the majestic arms of the Milky Way Galaxy, our home, our home galaxy. Should we call ourselves Milky Wayans? At a 8-light-minute distance from our Sun, we move with the whole solar system around the Center of the Milky Way. If it was not...

Challenges with a Career in Astronomy – starting from zero over and over again due to moving

There are many challenges associated with life. Then, there are certain challenges when you pursue a career, a job, a profession. I focus here on a few challenges that I face in pursuit of a career in astronomy. This is from my subjective experience, so, take it with...

The rainbow of light, aka the electromagnetic spectrum

Light has wavelengths beyond the visible blue-green-red-yellow colors, actually many more wavelengths than the so-called visible range (to human eyes). This is illustrated in the following diagram from my thesis. For example, wavelengths that are longer than the...

Tables, tables, tables! Combining your results with archival catalogs and literature results in Astronomy/Science research

I am just posting a drop, a touch of what happens when you try to understand how your research results compare to what has been found before and reported in published (credible) literature. I am going to use a figure from my own thesis, Figure 28, see the video below ...
Image Credits: Telescope by Juan Pablo Bravo from the Noun Project

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