This is about an hour away from my farm, so this'll be a fun conversation, and yet another great opportunity to tell a lot of people about what a huge problem we have with unregulated commercialization of orbit. (Also I just redid my slides for my public talk next week, this is going in!)
WELL I just looked at the cute little prairie newsletter in my inbox from The Flatlander https://theflatlander.ca/ and uh... that's me in the picture for story number 2, despite me not having been interviewed by them.
Turns out I've had a giant misunderstanding with someone who's been talking about going out to find pieces and map out the debris field... I thought they were planning to come here, but they were actually asking me to price out my "university research services" doing the fieldwork. My university doesn't have magical "research services" to do fieldwork, and I'm the only astronomer, so it would just be ME.
That is...a lot to ask me to do, especially since I'm not trained for this...sigh.
I'm getting 6-7 liters per day of milk and so I have to make a lot of cheese. Today's cheesemaking adventure, maybe something I can age at least for a couple weeks.
Am I brave enough to try putting it into one of the willow baskets I made this winter instead of a plastic container? Hmmm
Well, first flip and I've already learned some important things about using natural baskets for cheesemaking. Like...don't have a lip on the inner rim of the basket at ALL. Oops.
But I really love the woven pattern that gets pressed into the cheese!!
Time for a radio interview about planets or something while the cheese drains.
One thing I absolutely love about living here is the way that neighbours helping neighbours is deeply ingrained in the culture of rural farms here.
Last night, just as I was about to go to bed, our neighbour called: "You guys have a tiny horse, right? Is your tiny horse in with my cows?"
OH NO. My tiny horses are ancient and not very ambitious, but maybe something scary happened and part of a fence fell down? We walked quickly through our neighbour's cow pasture to see.
As I got closer, I could see my neighbour's cows all staring horrified at a tiny brown horse... that was definitely not my horse!
I had brought a halter, lead, and a cup of senior horse kibbles, which I shook gently at the horse and he came running right up to me, and let me put the halter on while he gently nibbled delicious super-fatty senior horse kibbles. He easily allowed himself to be led into a pen, and looked hilariously tiny next to my neighbours enormous meat cattle.
We chit-chatted with our extremely nice neighbours while they called the other neighbours across the road, who also have mini horses. After a few minutes of watching the tiny horse (who had a hilariously high-pitched whinny), the other neighbours arrived, clearly coming from some event because they were all wearing nice clothes rather than farm clothes. The dad jumped out, looking really stressed, got a good look at the horse, and visibly relaxed as he said "That's not my horse!"
So then all of us had a really nice chat about whose horse it might be (the theory is the horse was recently sold by a different neighbour and was maybe trying to go home). Also cattle, space junk, gardening, and a sprinkling of gossip.
All the while, it was lightly, pleasantly raining, the cows were mooing, and there were distant flashes of lightning on the horizon in several directions as it got gradually darker. Icing on the cake: on the walk home we saw the first fireflies of the summer!
So...mostly this story is a reminder to myself that talking to people, even my rural, conservative neighbours (who I sometimes find myself avoiding because I'm not the most socially adept person), is actually a really good thing to do and I should try to do it more often!
The tiny horse is still at my neighbour's house, but they've put out a note on Facebook (which is how pretty much everyone internets here). And that is definitely getting the word out because we already had a different neighbour text and ask if it was our horse!
Kind of weird/hilarious that after living in urban and suburban settings in many different cities around North America, I had to move to a super-rural farm to feel like I'm part of a neighbourhood for the first time in my life.
UPDATE: my neighbours just stopped by to return my halter and lead because they found the owner and they got their horse back.
Apparently he's a regular escape artist and is from a farm about 10km away from here!! They're going to try to sell him, if anyone wants an adorable but impossible-to-contain tiny horse...
I'm trying to make the laziest possible mozzarella (the game here is: how many steps of the instructions can I skip and still have something that resembles mozzarella? Today I'm going to try skipping the heating-in-warm-whey step and see if it's still approximately the same substance)
Today is supposed to be a day for me to catch up on farm stuff, but I also had an idea for a paper with a new way to show how dangerous and stupid Starlink is, so we'll see...
The lazy mozzarella melted just fine on my lunch quesadilla! (Well, as well as goat mozzarella ever melts, which is, not perfect, but good enough). Excellent.
And a grad student is already writing the paper I had the idea for, so even better! I don't have to write it, and it's going to get published. Yay.
Here comes a thread on light pollution from satellites, with a concrete action that you all can take to help push for regulation of satellites in orbit!
Astronomers have been worried about light pollution from satellites (if you've been following me for more than 24 hours, you've perhaps heard a bit about this). Astronomers spent SO much time and effort begging and pleading with Starlink to make their satellites fainter, with mixed results.
@loko Cubesats are not the problem - they are tiny. The latests Starlink satellites are the size of Ford F150s, and the direct-to-cell satellites will have footprints the size of a tennis court. So, while launching hundreds of cubesats isn't great, it's nowhere near the disaster in collisions and pollution that Starlink is.
The best thing to do might be to advocate for better rural and remote ground-based infrastructure at all levels of government, so that people don't need Starlink!