Today's challenge: modify my "billionaires dropping garbage on us from orbit" talk to be informative for farmers who found actually space debris in their fields, while not scaring the crap out of the grade 5 students who are going to come listen too.

(Giving a talk at the Ituna Library this week! I hope lots of people come and ask good questions)

The moon is very bright, but there are very faint auroras, too! (The pillars are just barely naked-eye visible, they look amazing in a few second exposure! The red colour on top is completely invisible naked-eye.)

Today is my day to smugly gloat about how I live in a province where we stay on standard time all year long, so I didn't have to change my clocks last night.

Tomorrow is my day to be very frustrated and apologize a lot as I miss all the meetings that have shifted because everyone else's time changed.

Spent allll day outside, fixing things, cleaning up, getting the farm and house ready for Real Canadian Winter, and hanging out with my animals. It was pretty good.

Ha, this totally sounds like compliment fishing, doesn't it? It's more just "this interview that I stressed out about all week just aired" and I don't want to listen to it because I'm stressed about it. But I want other people to listen to it!

...this is all just Impostor Syndrome again, isn't it? GAH.

Time to go back outside to my goats and dogs (and llama) who never have any impostor-y thoughts.

I got one text from a colleague saying they heard me on Quirks and Quarks. I don't think I'm going to listen to this one... let me know how it came out (I hope they edited well, that wasn't my best interview ever... sigh.)

A weird part about living in a very rural place is that I will never get trick-or-treaters at my house, and we have to drive to a town for trick-or-treating! But all the small towns around here are *SUPER* in to Halloween. Time for much candy to be acquired by my kids. (I'm glad it's only about 0C for trick-or-treating this year, so the candy isn't going to freeze in their bags like in past years...)

I wrote a paper https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022AJ....163...21L/abstract a few years ago with Aaron Boley and @hannorein and our horrifying predictions for light pollution from satellites are matching up perfectly, Lemmon was low in the northwest for this video: https://mediaspace.uregina.ca/media/Latitude+50N%2C+Equinox/0_4js9u8h4

I'd even argue we were a bit too conservative/optimistic in our assumptions of satellite brightnesses. I've never wanted to be wrong in a scientific paper before, but I sure wanted to be wrong about that one.

Shit.

The astrophotographer I worked with earlier this month, Jeanine Holowatuik https://www.instagram.com/jeanine.holowatuik/ https://northernescapephotography.com/about/ sent me some horrifying (Halloween-levels of scary) time lapse movies she took of Comet Lemmon.

Why horrifying? Starlink.

I should add that the chickens are even more offended by snow than the goats. They are refusing to even come out of their coop today. I can't blame them, really. It's only another... 6 or 7 months of snow though...

(Yeah I said it. 6-7. Take that, 13 year olds.)