Notices by Prof. Sam Lawler (sundogplanets@mastodon.social), page 12

Started my morning off right with baby goat snuggles

Babies and mama are looking great (the mama passed the placenta with no trouble, yay).

They will get spoiled with a heat lamp tonight (even though it's not even getting below freezing tonight), and tomorrow night I think they'll be just fine with snuggle-warmth.

I think I can safely sleep through the night tonight without a 2am barn check, but I have 2 more goats due in the next few days, so I'll make sure to fully enjoy my uninterrupted night's sleep tonight

Mama is doing an amazing job of cleaning them and feeding them already. Impressive work, mama!

I am extremely happy it's not 2am or -25C out. Yay!

Still no baby goats - really hoping today is the day (because tomorrow is all day Zoom meetings)

The plus side of having to go out to the barn at 2am to check on pregnant goats is that there were faint auroras (which actually must have been pretty bright just to compete with the nearly-fully moon), and I heard 2 great horned owls calling back and forth to each other.

...still no baby goats

No baby goats yet, but it's nice to see all the animals enjoying the warm sun. That goat in the middle of the picture using the other goat as a pillow might be the most blissfully comfortable creature in the world.

Guess what? Still no baby goats.

Still no baby goats.

But the livestock guardian dog found THE BEST spot in the whole yard to guard from. What a good dog!

Still no babies! That poor mama goat is huge and her udder is so big it is painful to look at.

Starting to get a bit worried, but she's not quite late enough for it to be likely there are any problems (also there are no vets at all anywhere around here who work on goats, so I'm on my own whatever happens ☹️ )

augh still no baby goats. Probably will have them at 2am.

...still no baby goats. But it's actually been kind of nice to force myself to go outside and check on the very pregnant one every hour or so during all these meetings!

STILL no babies! I was so sure she was going to have them last night I turned on the heat lamp for her. Only to find a very comfortable, very pregnant goat, basking under the heat lamp when I checked on her at 2am and 6am (man I am tired...) Last year one of my goats was 5 days late and all the babies had severe nutritional problems, which I worked really hard to not have this year...ugh farming is hard.

Anyway...the baby chicks are doing great! (Definitely in their "awkward stage" though)

Still no babies.

But I did get to watch the llama and the livestock guardian dog having an extremely chill disagreement about whether this hay bale is a comfy watchtower or a delicious snack.

THIS IS NOT A DRILL: WE HAVE BABY GOATS!!!

Oh my gosh they're so cute

I'm reasonably sure the mama goat is *finally* in labour! I'm going to go sit in the barn with my tablet and read a neutrino PhD thesis while keeping her company and making sure everything goes smoothly.

Since several people asked as follow-up, Kessler Syndrome is where the number of collisions between satellites and/or junk in Earth's orbit continue to increase, even if you don't add more to the system. We're probably already at this point, but the collision rate is very low (so far).

That could change quickly, if there is a collision that releases a large amount of debris close to Starlink's orbital shell, which is by far the densest part of Earth's orbit (and they're adding more every week)

Ok this poll was fascinating. 1) I thought a much larger fraction of people I interact with here are astronomers. 2) I thought "Kessler Syndrome" had a lot more name recognition!

Thank you all for providing valuable data for me and my colleagues to use as we try to educate the general public about the dangers of unregulated commercial satellite deployment.

How worried should we all be?

This is real-time data of close approaches between stuff in orbit (credit to Dr. Moriba Jah): http://astriacss03.tacc.utexas.edu/ui/min.html

1-2km close approaches every few minutes doesn't seem too bad, but remember everything in orbit travels at *several km per second* and most of these tracked objects don't have the ability to maneuver.

It's pretty bad, folks.

@jdlbt yes!

@thomasfuchs Amateur astronomer = astronomer!