Today's kitten just wants the election to be over.
Posted on 07/12/2016 8:03:24 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Pluto isn't quite as lonely as scientists had thought.
Astronomers have discovered another dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy objects beyond Neptune. But this newfound world, dubbed 2015 RR245, is much more distant than Pluto, orbiting the sun once every 700 Earth years, scientists said. (Pluto completes one lap around the sun every 248 Earth years.)
"The icy worlds beyond Neptune trace how the giant planets formed and then moved out from the sun," discovery team member Michele Bannister, of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, said in a statement. "They let us piece together the history of our solar system."
...
The exact size of 2015 RR245 is not yet known, but the researchers think it's about 435 miles (700 kilometers) wide. Pluto is the largest resident of the Kuiper Belt, with a diameter of 1,474 miles (2,371 km).
The research team first spotted 2015 RR245 in February of this year, while poring over images that the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii took in September 2015 as part of the ongoing Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS).
"There it was on the screen — this dot of light moving so slowly that it had to be at least twice as far as Neptune from the sun," Bannister said.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Edna.......*nods of approval*. :)
The North Carolina Zoo has puffins.
I like puffins. And yes, they ARE ridiculously cute. Squee!
My email this morning informed me that the check for my registration had been cleared, so any day now, the sticker for the plate will come.
I checked the Utah DMV and depending on what I want, it will cost me $20 to $60 to register the truck. And no smog test. :o])
And things are looking really good!
How on earth do you keep Puffins in a zoo?
They can fly, dig ,and are fitted with wire cutters.
Probably in an aviary... methinks.
I’ve only ever seen them through binoculars, they erect fences around their colonies.....clever birds. :)
Cement. Lots of cement. A big rock wall and an oceanfront faced with Plexiglas.
Do the visitors to the zoo hear the thudds as the pufins fly into the plexiglass?
Ah, that makes sense.
I bet they are a right handful. :)
Hmmm. Should I blame thudds on Darksheare or claim it was onomatopoeia not a true spelling?
And why isn’t onomatopoeia spelled the way it sounds?
I’m off for the night, Kiddoes! Be good to yourselves! :o])
'Cause nobody knows how to pronounce it, and therefore nobody knows what it should sound like.
Considering that the coy-wolves are more often heard than seen, there have been fleeting sightings under flashlight beam of reflective eyeballs that quickly avert their glance and are not seen again both back in the pictured field and other locations.
For descriptive purposes there are three fields that are farmed here plus what once was a pasture but is now just a glorified weed patch of purple loosestrife, goldenrod, something that smells a lot like chrysanthemum when mowed/disturbed, and a splattering of wild roses, black raspberries, thistles, nettles, cattails and other assorted flora.
The pictured field (the West field, which is more technically the Northwest field) is to the left as you exit the back door. If you exit the house and continue straight forward there is the Milk House and the was-a-barn with a splattering of decrepitizing outbuildings behind it, a pond behind them, and regrown trees to the end of the property line (trees that were all nonexistent in the 1969 aerial photo except for a big oak by the pond.) To the right of the was-a-barn is the silo, unused of course but in better physical shape than the was-a-barn.
Exiting the back door and veering to the right is the was-a-pasture (most often I refer to it as the field East of the silo - you know, the one where the assault weapons that survived the terrible boating accident are buried), now a hideyhole for bambis and whatever other critters (including Wiley E.) that visit. When the temps plummet, as they are want to do (purely due to globull warmthing you know) in the coming months, the greenery in the was-a-pasture will succumb to a non-sustaining environment and offer less and less cover to critters of all stripes.
If you continue across the was-a-pasture you run into a farm road. Making a left on that farm road brings you to first the hay field and then if continuing, the corn field the combination of which I refer to as the East field.
To the East of the farm road is more regrowth trees to the East property line, a well, some remnants of no longer existing buildings, and what could be another pond but I have not visited it to verify.
In all of the above the Wiley E. relatives are prone to hide when their circuit brings them through here. We usually determine where they are by a combination of the direction of their noisings and the volume of same to determine which field they are roaming and how far back in it they are roaming.
That said, remember I mentioned a new cat that appeared? We have not sighted it since - we think the Coy-O-Tays got him/her. Son #1 says he found what seemed to be fluffycat remains (a tail and a paw of the proper color) back by the pond. We figured from the way it was acting when it was spotted that someone dumped it and if it was used to being indoors it wouldn’t know how to survive in the hostile ‘feral’ world especially since it wouldn’t know the safe spaces and fortified areas. And it looks as if that was true.
A thudd most often follows the words. “Hold ma beer ‘n watch this.”
If they are all stripes how can they be spotted?
“Ay kan back ma truck intu thish!”
Well, the stripped ones can usually be located by use of the sense of smell..
So technically they aren’t spotted. Just smelt.
Which is a fish.
And who can argue with that?
Today's kitten just wants the election to be over.
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