Villa Santana, Rancho Santana 

K and I “Irish exited” Delray Beach Tuesday, the 4th, to spend a sneak-week at our home in Nicaragua. The plan was to lay low and get lots of work done. And/or reading. And K, at least, succeeded.

I was found out. And by day three had my calendar nearly blocked – although at 5:30 every afternoon, our old friend TG, who has been living in Rancho Santana for 11 years now, stops by to make us “tequila sunsets.”

The photo above was the view on Monday, the 10th. (I was excited to be able to get the sunset reflected in the pool.) Two nights before that, we had an even more remarkable view.

It was an hour after sunset, and the sky was a wide, upwards arching blackboard speckled with the chalk dust of stars – some of which TG was naming for us. “In this sky, the brightest is always Venus,” he said. “And that one just above us – it’s pretty bright, too – that one’s Jupiter.”

Suddenly, coming from the southern sky, I saw a line of stars moving in a northwest direction. “What the heck is that?” I asked TG.

“That’s your friend Elon’s project,” TG said. “They call it a ‘Starlink satellite train.’ It happens after SpaceX launches a new batch of its Starlink satellites.”

There were dozens of tiny white orbs moving quickly across the sky above us, appearing out of the black and then disappearing into it as they entered and exited the path of the sunlight.

I’ve seen a dozen comets and even a comet shower, but I’ve never seen anything as exciting as that. I wondered what it would be like to be Musk watching them, knowing that he’d put them up there. It humbled me.

This is what it looked like:

And here’s an animated view.