Notices by Prof. Sam Lawler (sundogplanets@mastodon.social)

Updating talk slides so you all get to be horrified along with me at the current Starlink numbers.

There are now 7,652 Starlink satellites in orbit (>500 more than there were in February, when I last updated these particular slides).

2-3 Starlinks per day are burning up in the atmosphere. That's a lot of weird metal in the atmosphere (and undoubtedly lots of random bits getting to the ground too).

Starlink is a stupidly wasteful and dangerous way to use orbit.

I may have accidentally given my llama a mohawk.

I'm sorry, dude, I'm not very good at shearing. But you'll be a lot cooler this summer! (Temperature-wise, if not fashion-wise)

No progress yet because I am bad at this. But check out their website, they have a truly impressive data network! https://globalmeteornetwork.org/

(Hopefully I can figure out how to join it ha ha)

Time to see if I can get the raspberry pi for my shiny new Global Meteor Network cameras up and running without screwing anything up too badly!

I feel like I know just enough about linux configuration stuff to get myself into serious trouble... cries for linuxy-nerd-help may soon follow...

It got a lot worse in the last couple of hours 😩

To clarify, the fires are far away from me. But the smoke certainly is not.

@HarriettMB I don't think there's anything I can do for them :(

Hard to say good morning when it looks like this outside...

@steter There is already satellite internet from geosynchronous orbit. It's just slower than Starlink. But Starlink is absolutely not viable the way it's being built, so I guess that's what remote users will be stuck with.

I'm not sure why so many of my meetings with US-based astronomers end up on Friday afternoons, but it sure makes me want to give up on anything productive and go out and scream in the hay field afterwards (not because of the astronomers, because of what's happening to science in the US).

But...it's currently so smoky outside that it's probably not actually safe for me to go field-rage-scream. Maybe I'll put on an N95 and do it anyway...

Oh hey cool, an op-ed I wrote is now published!

TLDR: we need *fewer* satellites with *longer* operational lifetimes. Engineers: that's your challenge.

https://www.livescience.com/space/astronomy/what-goes-up-must-come-down-how-megaconstellations-like-spacexs-starlink-network-pose-a-grave-safety-threat-to-us-on-earth-opinion

There was a very big, really needed emphasis on Indigenous perspectives, and lots of viewpoints from Native Hawaiians. I was quite impressed that they brought in an archeologist to talk about how archeology is slowly transforming from colonialist, racist viewpoints, to "community archeology," conducted in partnership with the (mostly Indigenous) people who live on and are connected to the land being studied.

The meeting I just attended was the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope User's Meeting. It was a bunch of talks about all the cool science that's being done with the telescope, and a LOT of discussion about where the telescope is going next. Lack of funds means they will be cutting a lot (like everything science-related, it seems).

Updating my satellite numbers for the talk I'm giving for the Nanaimo amateur astronomer club tonight.

There are now 7,540 Starlinks in orbit (240 more than last time I gave this talk 3 weeks ago). There are 11,577 total satellites (though I know this is missing a bunch because Space Force is getting slower and slower at cataloguing...)

Starlink is ~2/3 of all satellites.

SpaceX effectively controls orbit (as they have for quite a while now)

Good morning.

Thorough analysis of satellite reentries over the last 5 years, and how they were affected by the May 2024 solar storm: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13752

Personally, I think the paper has way too much of a tone of "wow look at all this great reentry data! We can learn so much about satellite drag!" and not nearly enough "Holy shit guys, that's a lot of metal burning up in the atmosphere, maybe this is a bad idea?"

HAHAHAHA oh man that was weird.

I often get asked by local radio shows to talk about whatever is happening in the sky, and because I have a lot happening, I usually prep for this by doing a web search for "astronomy events" or "astronomy news" and today this is what duckduckgo gave me:

Good, I got to yell a bit about "demisability":

I've now seen pieces of TWO SpaceX spacecraft that fell on Saskatchewan in 2024 that were supposedly "fully demisable," so that's a big fat lie. And even if they were fully demisable, the amount of metal they've added to the upper atmosphere already is completely terrifying, let alone their plans for many tons of metal and plastic added to the stratosphere every day at full operation.

WE NEED fewer sats with longer operational lifetimes.

I forgot that Victoria Day and Memorial Day are on different weekends this year (sometimes they're the same) so I volunteered for an American Astronomical Society thing today, on a holiday in Canada. Whoops. At least I only have to talk for like 2 minutes and just be ready to answer questions at the end. After that overview of light pollution and satellite pollution advocacy work is done, it's back to goats and kid birthday party prep.

Over the weekend I learned that llamas love rhubarb. Who knew?