“ Never lick with animals or children ” the older saying goes . life scientist do n’t have much pick in the matter , but astronomers might be thought to be safe from misconduct brute . If science ’s role is to overturn assumptions , however , it ’s time to expose this one , revealing it ’s not just clouds that can make a night ’s keep an eye on tricky .

pencil lead engineer at Australia ’s Stromlo observatoryJamie Gilbertput out a call …

… and the answer show he was not bark up the unseasonable instrument . Along with stories of starlings nuzzle inside a telescope noodle and steady visitations by insect plagues , there was this :

and this :

Unsurprisingly moth present a major hazard , even in pawn that are shut tight , but how on Earth do larger animal do the same thing ?

manifestly the trouble is so common it draw up an entire chapter of aforthcoming record book .

Some story are so wild they deserve to be true , even if they in all probability are n’t .

peradventure it is something about their locations at the top of mountains that sometimes get insect plagues to professional observation tower in such numbers .

It ’s not just through getting inside operating observatories that fauna can pose a threat .

No Australian will be surprised about this :

One Snake River can ruin your whole night ’s observing , but not necessarily in the way you would ask .

It was pointed out that something standardised happened to the Large Hadron Collider .

Where other cultures saw pattern in the stars , Indigenous Australians gave more significance to the dust swarm that block out parts of the Milky Way , take form a silhouette of a “ dark emu ” under respectable seeing conditions . Other brute are apparently also keen to get in on the act .

lastly we have come to the most renowned example of fauna affecting astronomic equipment , or at least being thought to .

Drs Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Labs got an annoying hissing phone from their ultrasensitive radio telescope in 1964 . They attributed this to a mixture of squash racquet and pigeon shite , which they went to a great heap of effort to remove . fortuitously for the history of science , the racket did n’t go away after all their exploit .

But not all the brush are so annoying . Some are positively wholesome .