Good morning. Last night I dreamed that a volcano opened up on my farm, and I had to go apologetically tell my neighbours about it (because somehow it was my fault). I definitely went through a phase as a kid (which I'm sure was hilarious/incredibly […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

First willow weaving of the season! I need to do a lot more of this.

Hoo boy the spam levels are high today. I really need to switch servers but it's haaaarrrrdddd (whine whine whine. I know it's actually not hard. I just need to make decisions about servers and spend some time making sure I 100% understand the process... THAT is the hard part)

Lots of truly terrible stuff is happening in the US government, but 2 senators just reintroduced the "Dark and Quiet Skies Act" to protect the sky from light pollution and satellite pollution and that's a really big step in the right direction! […]

Look at this gem of the past I just watched from CBC, 1995! This was in my YouTube Recommended algorithm today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0EXga2hEIs It features a young @pluralistic extolling the virtues of the Internet. Among other things, he warned people about not getting sucked into […]

I was feeling grumpy about an interview I agreed to a few days ago with the student-run campus newspaper, but that was such a great interview! I am so impressed by the questions the student asked me! Gives me hope: there are some fantastically talented students out there who are already doing […]

I am hiring 4 postdoctoral researchers for up to 4 years each. Topics include ice sheet reconstruction, GIA, spatial stats, and satellite geodesy. Based in Tasmania. All details are here: careers.utas.edu.au/en/listing/ with titles below I am also recruiting multiple PhD students (see below) 1/n

Looking for an elder 2SLGBTQI+ person to join my volunteer non-profit board at https://ODLAN.ca. Must be based in Canada, since we serve Canadian non-profits in our community. We're doing some really neat work and are growing our reach and impact every year. Help our 2SLGBTQI+ communities exist […]

[goat breeding] Got my exercise in this morning as my partner and I pretty much ran a goat rodeo to separate my herd into two for breeding. The older does were *extremely* excited to have Durian, their buck, back. The younger does were not super impressed […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

The Sask small town mayor who came up with this idea to sell naming rights to his town to the highest corporate bidder (apparently without consulting anyone in his community) was right that it would get Duck Lake into the news... but I'm guessing that his time as mayor is not going to be a long […]

Omg, we're such a joke and a menace. Well deserved :face_melting: --- Canada received Tuesday’s Fossil of the Day award at the COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil. The award, bestowed by Climate Action Network International, recognizes the country deemed to have done the most each day to […]

Yesterday I told my boss that I'm not going to be applying for any funding to stay in Europe (for multiple reasons. Postdocing has to end eventually, and living on the other side of the planet from my friends, family, and the Australian bush isn't working for me). He said, 'Makes sense you want […]

Ok the #page42 exercise is going to make me cry. I picked up "Losing the Sky" by Andy Lawrence, because it's been sitting on my desk as I slowly force myself to read this book about the environmental crisis happening in orbit, but written 5 years ago before it was really bad. Perfect example of […]

Remember kids, always check for planets before taking a 5 minute exposure with a 4 meter telescope to look for Kuiper Belt Objects! Background: My collaborator running the processing for our survey is now wading through that hilarious/super annoying mistake […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Hilariously, I found out about the #cloudflare outage by trying to use a goat gestation calculator from the American Goat Society after breeding the first goat of the year this morning.

I just got cold-called by a reporter in Saskatoon asking if the Riders' Grey Cup feed could have been glitching a lot because of satellite issues/solar activity. That is the most Saskatchewan question I have ever been asked. What an honour, I guess?

I'm famous in Ituna!

A friend came up with a nice metaphor for a message you would have replied to but somehow missed: "It disappeared over the event horizon of my inbox."

[food, dairy] Today's milk experiment: ryazhenka, a Ukrainian baked milk yogurt. I left a pot of milk in the oven at ~200F for 24 hours. It got...super weird. But delicious! It's caramelized, but not really sweet. (I ate some warm on cereal for breakfast - […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

I am so grateful for the skies here in Saskatchewan! Also, bonfires with friends.

Your cool wikipedia animation of the day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keogram#/media/File:Keogram_explainer.gif

I just listened to this podcast a few days ago that includes Alice Wong and lovingly showcases the challenges she faced with productively-directed anger and fantastic humour. I never interacted with her personally, but I've learned so much from her. Rest in power, Alice […]

Rest in power, Alice Wong. We were Twitter mutuals for a while and we exchanged a bunch of dms about Chinese food and ice cream. She said she could not eat most foods due to her disability but she enjoyed talking about and reading about them. She was also […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

Gutted. We have lost a brilliant voice in the world. Rest in peace Alice Wong @sfdirewolf.bsky.social you were so inspiring to so many of us. Thank you for sharing all your words and for always shining a light on the disability community.

[complaining and food] Well, today has been totally fucking terrible. And I have a 6pm meeting. 6pm Friday meetings are aaaawwwwful but this is something I care a lot about so it'll be worth it (I keep telling myself). Maybe it's time to take a brownie-baking break in an attempt to make today […]

A surprisingly good write-up of our recent paper on the formation of the Solar System: https://www.universetoday.com/articles/the-intruder-that-knocked-our-planets-askew

LAUNCH at 0304 UTC Nov 14 of Atlas AV-100 from Canaveral with the Viasat-3F2 communications sat

I was trying to write up a summary of different types of Earth orbits for a scicomm piece, and got sucked into this incredible rabbit hole on orbital stability outside geosynchronous orbit and resonances with the Moon... ohhh I loooove resonances... More here: "The Resonant Structure of xGEO […]

@sundogplanets 🤪

Boy I'm really racking up the unpaid university appointments... but that's part of how I have to do research work, because I'm the only professional research astronomer in Saskatchewan, at a university with no astronomy major. So, in order to co-supervise students, I'm also an affiliate prof at […]

Tonight's Aurora Forecast (12/12/25) ps. Last night was well more than the forecast, aurora to Florida and Mexico. This CME is supposed to be stronger, but TBD if the aurora does the same thing again.

Light pollution: The silent threat to the planet that's easily solved https://phys.org/news/2025-11-pollution-silent-threat-planet-easily.html

The possibility of auroras tonight is all that's getting me through this giant pile of stressful emails.

Looks like the CME might have taken at least one satellite offline... (NASA VIIRS) Dear LANCE-MODIS Users: Currently, there is a S-NPP VIIRS data outage. No science data has been received since 11/11/25 11:36:50 UTC due to an anomaly at Fairbanks, impacting all S-NPP data processing. There is […]

Aurora in southern New Mexico - now with green bands added! (This was at approx 7:20PM Mountain Daylight time) 2nd graphic shows the sky coverage of the wide angle lens I'm using. The aurora is 30 to 35 degrees above the horizon when it's bright. Real-time […] [Original post on universeodon.com]

I cannot believe how much misinformation there is about comet 3I/ATLAS. It's just very cool on its own without having to be an alien spaceship conspiracy... Prof. Jason Wright wrote a great breakdown of all the ways Avi Loeb is wrong about his awful alien conspiracy theories, and why 3I/ATLAS […]

For those who keep asking me about 3I/ATLAS, here's a great writeup by my friend @astrowright.bsky.social sites.psu.edu/astrowright/...

Currently trying to decide if it's worth driving to a dark sky site tonight (~1 hr drive, I know, I'm super lucky) even though some high clouds are moving in, or if I should wait until tomorrow night, when currently the forecast looks better (but it looked really good for tonight earlier today […]

Good morning. I'm hoping for clear skies and auroras tonight, and success in juggling a ridiculous number of family and work commitments during the day today.

It's so pretty!! (I keep affirming to myself over and over.... it was -19C this morning when I went out to do chores)

@sundogplanets Just to clarify one point - streetlights are usually found to be responsible for *less* than half of light emissions or skyglow. Here is a table from a paper we published: https://doi.org/10.26607/ijsl.v25i1.133 I also misremembered that there […] [Original post on fediscience.org]

I just was on a panel for DarkSky International's Under One Sky conference. The panel was about novel and emerging sources of light pollution, I was there to yell a lot about Reflect Orbital. One of the other panelists was Jolyon Troscianko, who studies animal vision at night (how totally […]

Alarm Grows over Proposed Giant Mirrors in Orbit and Other Commercial Space Plans November 6, 2025 Seeking Profits, Private Companies Look to Light up the Night Sky Reflect Orbital’s plan to deliver “sunlight on demand” using thousands of giant orbital mirrors is just the latest in a growing […]

Supposed to be 100% cloudy and snowing here tonight for G3-level auroras, but if you have clear skies get outside and look! Hopefully the auroras keep going for Saturday night when I'm supposed to get much clearer skies! (Downside: forecast is for a low of -17C on Saturday night which is...ugh […]

It is so much more satisfying to put people in front of cameras than it is to be the person someone else is putting in front of a camera.

LAUNCH at 0131 UTC Nov 6 of Starlink 6-81 from Canaveral

Today I'm bringing my telescope+solar filter to 2 different schools on Pasqua First Nation to show a bunch of kids some big fat sunspots, then giving a talk about space junk at the Ituna library (and the talk is mostly happening because librarians are all awesome). And it looks like I have […]

[cats are weird] Good morning to everyone, especially this cat who woke me up in the middle of the night churruping incredibly loudly for a ridiculously long time. When I went downstairs, she had dragged three stuffies and a hat into a pile in the middle of […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

[academia crowd-source grant question] Does anybody know of grants that could help support a Europe-based PhD student doing research on satellite pollution? This student currently has no funding and needs it badly to keep doing excellent (and much-needed research work). I'm not Europe-based so […]

Hot chicks in your barn right now. At least, pleasantly warm, incredibly fluffy chicks.