BAN #406: Young coyote, Young crater, Self care idea

Red in Tooth and Claw

I live in rural Colorado, and we get nature here

A couple of days ago I was sitting at my desk and some movement way outside my window caught my eye (it’s funny how many of my stories about photos I’ve taken start that way, but I do sit at my desk a lot). My binoculars were in another room so instead I grabbed my camera to use the telephoto and see what it was, assuming it was a bird or something of that nature.

By the time I could see it in my lens it was already a couple of hundred meters away in a field, but I snapped away, and to my surprise this is what I saw:

A young coyote ! It’s not a puppy anymore, but it doesn’t look really adult to me. My wife looked up when they have pups and it’s usually April/May, so this one would have to be almost a year old. It looks younger than that to me, but then it was a sunnny day and the thermals off the field were distorting the view pretty well.

Either way, it was alone, and trotting across the field. It wasn’t on the hunt, clearly, so probably just moving from one area to the next. It was moving with a limp, and I could see it was favoring its front paw. I’m not sure if it had a run in with a neighbor’s dog or if it had just hurt itself in all the icy mud we have here after a brutal cold snap turned into a ridiculous warm patch of weather. It’s goo everywhere out there right now.

It was panting pretty heavily, but again the weather turned warm so quickly it may have simply been unprepared for it (the patchy fur might support that idea). But it moved off at a good pace, keeping an eye on its surroundings. I hope it has good fortune finding rabbits and other little varmints. Plenty for a predator to eat around here, and it’s good to see nature doing its thing.

Life Hacks

Not what you might expect from an astronomer, but in my defense I am alive

The world has been pretty rotten lately. That’s just a fact. A lot of the terrible stuff is happening far away, and some closer, but for the past couple of years in particular I’ve found it affecting me more and more on a constant basis. The endless firehose of GOP debauchery, the pandemic, Russia, and more… it all eats away at my brain, and I know it’s been profoundly affecting others as well.

I sometimes find it very hard to sit at my desk and write. I imagine whatever it is you do to get through the day, it’s tough on you, too.

I found something really simple, though, that’s improved my ability to handle all this, so simple it seems almost silly: I’ve stopped (or nearly stopped) getting on social media before I’ve had breakfast and my morning coffee. Instead, I read a little bit from a book, maybe do Wordle and Quordle, and let that start my day.

Seriously. This works for me, and while it may not work for you, I find that what happens to me in that first hour or so of the day imprints itself on me and can make or ruin the ensuing hours. By keeping the hellsites out of my brain until I can achieve some sort of stability to my day, it helps me keep my mood from interfering with my ability to work.

I know, there’s a lot of privilege in this procedure, by just being able to (temporarily) ignore the maelstrom outside my walls. But self-care is important, and in fact it has a greater role. We all have to do our parts to fix all these problems and make the world better. That can be hard to do when you feel like it’s crushing you under its weight. If you can psychologically ease that pressure a bit, it’ll help.

I remember a scene from a Heinlein scifi novel I read when I was kid. Two people are escaping being held by kidnappers on the Moon, and they have to walk a long way in their spacesuits. The protagonist’s suit was working, but his companion’s was damaged, and she didn’t have any water. He felt guilty about taking a sip when his friend couldn’t. Then he realized he was being silly: he needed to keep his own strength up in case she needed him.

I don’t mean to trivialize anything that’s going on in the world, and I take what’s happening very, very seriously. But I also know the way my own brain works, and sometimes I need to take that sip of water even when others cannot, so that I can continue to do what I can to help.

Take a sip if you need to.

Pic o’ the Letter

A cool or lovely or mind-bending astronomical image/video with a short description so you can grok it

Well, this is pretty cool: The biggest crater younger than 100,000 years old has been found in China, edging out Barringer Crater in Arizona for the title!

It’s called Yilan Crater, and it’s near the city of Yilan in the Heilongjiang Province, a few hundred kilometers west of the Sea of Japan (here it is on Google Maps). The crater is about 50,000 years old, making it roughly the same age as Barringer Crater, but it’s bigger, at 1.8 km wide.

Here it is, seen by the Landsat 8 Earth observation satellite:

Very cool. Unlike Arizona, that area is pretty lush, so erosion is a bigger factor. The north rim looks fairly intact, but the south rim is gone. The floor of the crater isn’t bowl-shaped either; it looks flat to me, which indicates it was flooded or filled in with sediment over the years. The Balan river runs right past it, which may have something to do with it. The Google Maps image linked above was taken in winter and you can see snow extending from the southeast right into the crater, highlighting tributaries in the northern part of the floor. So yeah, it looks like water has played a heavy role in eroding this crater for the past few dozen millennia at least.

If I had to guess, I’d say water builds up in the crater over time and then flows south-southeast, and sometime in the past broke through the crater wall. Such is the fate of many craters on Earth; compare our landscape to the crater-saturated surface of the Moon. We both get hit at about the same rate — if anything the Earth gets and got hit more, since the Earth is a physically larger target and our higher gravity acts to draw material in — yet fewer than 200 craters are known on Earth’s surface. Tectonics, water, air… all act to erase the violence of Earth’s bombardment from its history.

So finding a crater like this (or the one I recently wrote about that should exist not too far from my house on the Wyoming/Nebraska border) is important to geologists. Asteroids and comets hit at hypervelocities, dozens of kilometers per second, and it’s difficult to model the physics of these events. Being able to send people into a crater and get samples of the rocks and map the details of the structure really helps us understand these catastrophic events.

Tip o’ the Whipple Shield to NASA’s Earth Observatory Image of the Day, which always produces amazing images and insight into our dynamic planet.

Et alia

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