Notices by Prof. Sam Lawler (sundogplanets@mastodon.social), page 2

Shit, the smoke came back. Amazing how doomy it makes me feel (which...makes complete logical sense. My province is burning).

It was nice to get a bit of a break from the smoke. Back to windows closed, air filters on. Everything feels terrible again.

I blew off a webinar and went for a bike ride and I feel a LOT better now.

Not many bikes around here so cows (especially young ones like these heifers) always have a delightful ?!?!? reaction when I bike up and say hi to them.

(part of the problem may be that I've already been up and working for almost 3 hours. Just not at things I get paid for.)

Well, it's 8:15 am and I just sat down at my computer to start the workday and I already feel a strong need to take a rage-screaming break out in the hay field. (Nothing in particular, just lots of ... everything.)

Great way to start the morning. Anyone want to join me?

I woke up at 1am. There were no auroras (just smoke 😭 )

Decent chance of auroras again tonight! https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/aurora-dashboard-experimental

(I am soooo tired so I might go to bed way before it's dark and set my alarm for 1am again...)

@usuario @sergiovds @pBaesse Yeah, the thing to worry about isn't debris hitting you on the ground, it's the atmospheric pollution from so much metal burning in the upper atmosphere.

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).