Miraz Jordan

Our View of Space Is Becoming Blurrier

the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope … sits in the Atacama desert [which] has warmed by 1.5 °C over the last four decades.

this causes turbulence within the dome, which degrades the image quality and causes blurring.

After a week of westerly gales, cloud, rain etc the beach this morning was absolutely stunning.

The Equinox | MetService Blog:

Equinox is on Wednesday, but due to refraction+width of sun the equilux (day with 12 hours of daylight) occurs today or yesterday in NZ depending on latitude.

☀️🕶 🥳

It’s about time my two remaining quail started laying eggs again. 🐦

One of the podcasts I really enjoy is Mothers of Invention, about climate justice. The episode We Are The People Of The Beans had a particularly interesting section about silvopastoral systems, that I think Aotearoa New Zealand, with all its cow farms, would benefit from.

Ambivalent about Murder The Boys (Detective Kate Power Mystery Book 1) by Judith Cutler 📚. The bad guy was obvious to the reader but not the Detective Sergeant who also seemed pretty wimpy for someone of her experience.

Boys are being abducted, abused, murdered on her patch

I finally got around to watching (and enjoying) Booksmart. It was both moving and funny.

It stars Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever as two graduating high school girls who set out to finally break the rules and party on their last day of classes

First time this season I’ve spotted ‘our’ kōtare (kingfisher).

Wow. I updated to Apple Safari v14, then visited @cheri’s website and followed a link to one other site. Then I looked at Safari’s Privacy report. It had blocked 18 trackers! It blocked Facebook at Cheri’s site and loads of trackers at the other one.

Kiwis: TVNZ ☛ Origins is superb!

Scotty Morrison explores the origins of the Māori people, visiting the Wairau Bar site which could be the first community in Aotearoa. He tries to locate his hawaiki, his homeland, in the Pacific, but is hawaiki a real place or just a concept?

Unfortunately this Common skink I found in the garden was very dead, but I was thrilled nevertheless. This proves that the extremely rare flashes of something I’ve thought I‘ve seen were very probably (live) skinks. I suspect recent frosts have taken their toll.