@JEmphatically well that's at least the opposite of the Sunlight-as-a-Service Reflect Orbital dystopian techbro shit in orbit that I've been screaming about for the last few weeks.

It just keeps getting worse! Shit!

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.)

The goats would like you to know that they are not happy about their grass getting covered up by a bit of snow (even though it was getting kind of iffy from repeated frosts). The dogs, however, would like you to know that snow is the BEST and they are very happy.

New York Times interview done! Lovely journalist! She's planning to slowly put this story together over the coming weeks as we see what is going to happen with FCC approval (which will require the US government to not be shut down)...

@NatureMC Wow I do NOT want to watch this before trying to find more debris pieces! Haha

Wow, well, fuck, that's one way to deal with crowding in orbit: https://www.livescience.com/space/the-sun/the-next-carrington-level-solar-superstorm-could-wipe-out-all-our-satellites-new-simulations-reveal

"The next Carrington-level solar superstorm could wipe out 'all our satellites,' new simulations reveal"

(this is not a good way to deal with crowding in orbit. Can we please please just have fewer satellites???)

Like I said, I'm guessing that SpaceX just left the pieces in North Carolina, because there's no treaty that makes them deal with it in their own country.

A tale of 3 Crew Dragon Trunks. 3 totally different ways of SpaceX dealing with their (potentially lethal) garbage.

SpaceX and others are going to drop a hell of a lot more on us (everything in LEO is coming down eventually), so I guess we'll see how they deal with it next time...

I'm hoping that by giving a talk in Ituna, I'll find out about a few more pieces that have been discovered since 2024. I am 100% sure there are more pieces.

I hope farmers will feel comfortable telling me about them. But I don't have $5000 to give them, and I don't have a good way to get in touch with SpaceX (they don't want to talk to me), and CSA still doesn't have any official way to report space debris, though supposedly they're working on it. It's all on me to find out about this garbage!

To contrast: When SpaceX reps came here to pick up the Crew Dragon Trunk pieces in a rented U-Haul, they didn't answer a single question from me or press, but they also paid farmers $5000 each. (That was also how much they paid for the Starlink piece that was found in a different part of Sask a few months later, though they just had the farmer FedEx the piece to them rather than pick it up in a U-haul).

The Canadian Space Agency (as far as I know) wasn't involved in either exchange at all.

I learned recently that everything went TOTALLY differently in Australia when SpaceX dropped a Crew Dragon Trunk on them in 2022: https://www.livescience.com/spacex-rocket-hits-sheep-farm

SpaceX reps came and answered lots of questions, looked at the pieces and said "yep, you can keep them." Then the Australian Space Agency said "Nope, those belong to us" and took them away from farmers with no compensation. As a result, there are lots of pieces still out there.

As I was laying awake in the middle of the night, thinking about the talk I agreed to give at the Ituna library next week about the SpaceX debris fall, I suddenly thought about the North Carolina campground that also found pieces of a Crew Dragon Trunk at the same time https://www.theglampingcollective.com/activities/spacex-dragon-debris/

And I wondered... do they still have them? Did SpaceX ever offer to pick them up? (Probably not because they weren't obligated by an int'l treaty...)

Anyway, that's *one* of today's wild emails to send.