Fires & Kepler

It's 17 degrees outside and another powdering of snow fell last night; since the sun is shining it won't last long. I had to call Lovey back inside this morning - she was playing the part of a cutting horse and using the squirrels as cattle. I thought she'd get tired of doing this in about 15 minutes; I called her inside at the end of 35... the squirrels seemed to be relieved. The critters cleaned out the feeders yesterday, so I had to refill everything this morning after my walk. I saw a couple of tourists out and about early today and they were exclaiming to me about how wonderful the weather is here... I didn't tell them that we were having an unusually dry and warm winter so far.

I do realize that I'm always whining or complaining about how dry we are. Our spring, summer, and fall water supply comes from the northern western slope of the Rockies - and they are having a good winter - with lots of snow... so we should be OK later in the year... But I worry about wildfires. Which naturally leads me to the wildfires in Australia. It is a terrible shame that some of the fires in Australia were caused by arson - a human who knowingly set fire to the sere countryside. I grieve for the waste of human lives, for the loss of whole communities, and (being me, with my critter leanings) I deplore the horrendous loss of wildlife. The news story of the volunteer fire-fighter sharing his water bottle with Sam, the female koala with burnt feet, was very touching. Just think of the numbers of people who died in these flash fires without warning - and then multiply it by the thousands for the indigenous wildlife who also had no chance of survival. It is truly a sad time in the Land Down Under.

Kepler will launch on March 5 at 8:50 (MST). Kepler was built by Ball Aerospace here in Boulder; it has a planned 3 and a half year mission during which it will follow in Earth's orbit and will keep its' observations trained on a single star field, hoping to find another Earth-like planet. Kepler will be commanded by undergraduates at CU's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. It will study more than 100,000 sun-like stars that astronomers believe have captured habitable planets within their gravity wells. - V-Ger, where are you?