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

It's finally time to get the round bales out of the field and closer to the goats so they can eat them all winter.

Currently stopping for a break to frantically calculate some telescope pointings for tomorrow night...

Good morning

Holy cow I was mega-productive today, despite being incredibly grumpy about everything. I got several big, annoying things done that I'd been procrastinating on for longer than I'd like to admit.

Now time for a quick mental health walk once the kids get home, then time to cook dinner for the family of my good friend who's in the last few days of running for re-election as a Sask MLA. This is my favourite kind of political action!

@Instrument_Data @Nichelle Perhaps because it isn't true.

Chicks are doing good this morning. The 2 mama hens have sorted out whose chicks are whose and the 2 small flocks seem to be getting along fine.

Our small horse seems to really enjoy having baby goats climb on his back: he makes the same face as when you give him good back scritches, and he kept standing in the same spot by the ledge that goats could use to climb onto his back, even though he could have easily walked away. Silly horse (but sillier goats)

After absurd travel, I am back at home after advocating to anyone who would listen at the UNOOSA workshop for fewer satellites with longer operational lifetimes. I had a lot of great chats and got my point across very well. But I also saw the frantic pace of future sat launches.

As we turned onto my rural road, and I finally saw my gorgeous prairie skies again, what was there to greet me? A FUCKING STARLINK TRAIN. I can't express how angry that made me.

I will keep fighting. I have to.

Something I've learned from this impressively international conference:

1. It's hard to explain to people from Europe how sparsely populated Saskatchewan is (yes the space debris fell ~50km from my house, but the number of houses I pass on the way is equivalent to a few city blocks)

2. It's hard to explain to people from Africa how cold Saskatchewan is (yes, our first frost was Sept 9, and our last frost was June 25ish, yes you really can still grow food there, yes it kind of sucks sometimes.)

The world is burning and spawning monster storms left and right, but I'm checked in for my stupid trans-Atlantic flight to go yell at important people in person (because of course it has to be in person...important people and all... this is dumb) about satellite pollution and why and how satellites need to be regulated. Gosh I hope this makes some aspect of our future planet slightly less terrible.

Well, pretty much everything went wrong today. But I did show my astro 101 class "Ambition" and it's still very awesome (they all enjoyed it, even though they have to write a little homework assignment about if they think a film about scifi-far-future-terraforming-wizards as promotion for a science mission is effective). You should probably watch it if you haven't!

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Videos/2014/10/Ambition_the_film

Nicole Mortillaro of CBC nicely lays out all the things that SpaceX's Starlink is doing to destroy astronomy and LEO.

"how much infrastructure in orbit do we need? How much can we put up there safely? How much can we put up there without having very long-term impacts on the environment?"

And of course, the article include the obligatory "SpaceX did not immediately respond to a CBC request for comment." because SpaceX doesn't think they have to answer to anyone.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/spacex-starlinks-astronomy-1.7334803

The American Astronomical Society has officially posted a statement voicing concern on the amount of atmospheric pollution from satellite megaconstellation launches and reentries, recommending a cap on the total flux of metal entering the atmosphere: https://aas.org/sites/default/files/2024-09/AAS%20Statment%20on%20Atmospheric%20Impacts.pdf

I haaaate writing reference letters! It's hard and no one has ever taught me how to do it and it's so incredibly important to the student I'm writing the letter for.

I'll stop complaining and finish writing the damn letter.

Bad news: I just found an incredibly stupid coding mistake that has caused me to doubt a super important model I've been using for planning telescope pointings.

Good news: the super important model is indeed correct, and all that doubt was for nothing!

Climate change lecture in astro 101 today. So hard to strike the right balance of conveying how bad things are without demoralizing all my students.

My takeaway messages for my students: There are always actions we can take to make the future less terrible. Also, GO VOTE.

The last 2 times I submitted a latex file to the arxiv it just worked! But I guess I used up all my good arxiv-karma already, because it hates the paper I'm trying to upload today... sigh.

How does one appease the latex/arxiv gods?

Of course there are military Starlinks. Shit.

"The LOFAR researchers also identified more brightly glowing satellites than publicly published orbital data accounted for. The researchers suspect the extras could be military Starlink satellites being deployed for a US Dept of Defense project called Starshield. If they’re right, the satellites are not as secret as the Pentagon thinks—and the interference problem could be worse than the public satellite numbers suggest."

https://www.science.org/content/article/worst-nightmare-elon-musk-s-starlink-satellites-could-blind-radio-telescopes

Tomorrow I've got an interview with the Financial Times and then the Wall Street Journal to talk about space junk and satellite pollution. So I guess maybe people with money are starting to notice that the commercial space race is a really really bad idea?

It's not just radio that they're screwing up (as you know, if you've looked up with your eyeballs into any reasonably dark sky recently). And giant direct-to-cell satellites are coming soon (thanks, FCC). The first one is as bright as the brightest stars in the sky.

Here's the Vera Rubin Observatory's updated full statement on satellite pollution and how it will hobble the science output of this taxpayer-funded science facility: https://www.lsst.org/content/lsst-statement-regarding-increased-deployment-satellite-constellations

Oh look, Starlink is continuing to screw up the sky in every way possible.

"Second-Generation Starlink Satellites Leak 30 Times More Radio Interference, Threatening Astronomical Observations"

https://www.astron.nl/starlink-satellites/

It's going to be "hilarious" when Starlink messes up the radio sky so badly that radio astronomers can't even use quasars to calibrate GPS anymore. There are so many consequences from all these stupid, cheaply built, disposable satellites. https://www.universetoday.com/105160/navigating-the-cosmos-by-quasar/

Oh what a beautifully written rant

"The fantasy—and it is a fantasy—isn't one of space travel and exploration and some bright Star Trek future for humanity, but one of winnowing and eugenics, of cold actuarial lifeboat logic, of ever greater reallocation from the dwindling many to the thriving few. That's the world as Elon Musk and his cohort want it; Mars colonization is just a pretext."

https://defector.com/neither-elon-musk-nor-anybody-else-will-ever-colonize-mars