Starlink gets a lot of flax for it but as an avid night sky photographer myself (IG: @dheeranet) who regularly goes to Bortle 1 parts of the world, I haven't found them to be an issue at all.

1. They are only visible when they are spinning up to orbit

2. They are too dim to desensitize your eyes, and are extremely easy to remove with the most basic of outlier rejection techniques; netizens often amplifiy outliers by max-stacking instead of outlier-rejected mean-stacking to make Starlink look much worse than it is

3. Lights from planes have ALWAYS been much, much, much, much worse than satellites. They still aren't particularly a problem for imaging if you know how to outlier reject, and their paths are known, predictable and trackable

I'm not an Elon-fan or anything but just giving a dose of objective reality here.

Not to detract from TFA's real issue which is light pollution from cities -- that's an actual issue as the regions of dark sky are shrinking.

It's not that big a deal for MOST people. I was on navy ships transiting the Pacific it's as dark as it can get on deck and sure, it's magical and spectacular (especially the NUMBER OF SHOOTING STARS!) but even in the middle of the ocean 99% of my fellow sailors could not have given less of a shit. I'd sit out there for hours and they all though I was a weirdo for it. So, while amazing, most people don't understand or care to understand the enormity of what's going on around them.

Most people didn't care about dark skys in the first place and still don't.

I hadn't been out to a dark sky in years so I went out to a deep part of Joshua Tree (Bortle 2-3) one night not too long ago just to see some stars. Wow, I was not expecting that many Starlinks up there.

Today I learned about the Bortle scale. I was completely ignorant about it.

> If you've never seen truly dark skies, do yourself a favour and go see what they look like during true night

I think I went from only ever experiencing Bortle 5-6 to Bortle 1 when I visited Merzouga and Erg Chebbi. Blew my mind, made me really appreciate the extent of light pollution almost everywhere else I've been.

Wanaka, in the South Island of New Zealand, still has pretty good views of the night sky. You can see an awful lot more stars than you can from major cities.

But even here it’s under threat: a recent new retail development on the edge of the town (called “Three Parks”) emits so much light that it illuminates the nearby hills at night. The sad thing is that much of this light seems unnecessary to me: eg a hardware / garden retailer has enormous floodlights to illuminate their inner courtyard constantly at night, even when they’re closed.

The rest of the town has always been pretty good at minimising light pollution, with soft, modest and well designed street lighting in residential areas. But such considerations have been forgotten completely with the new development. Three Parks emits more light pollution than the rest of the town combined!

> It's quite depressing how little society values the night sky,

Considering how little value we put on far more important things (like the climate or biodiversity), I'm not really surprised.

Putting astronomy on the dark side of the moon would probably work better than putting it into space because you can use some local material for construction.

Check out southwestern Ontario as well. I've driven through there on my way to Michigan a couple times. It's purple at night. The sky is purple.

I would have assumed that most plants need a daily light/dark cycle but maybe not?

> instead of building municipal internet

Starlink is intended and used as solution for places and uses for which municipal internet is not an option at all

(is it usable at all as replacement for municipal internet? I would guess that you would overcrowd connection quite quickly)

Humans have been looking at the stars every night for tens of thousands of years and we've essentially occluded the night sky to most in the matter of about 50 years, I don't even think most people know what we've lost anymore.

Are there places in EU that are dark and easy to visit?

> other internet providers dumping tens of thousands of satellites in orbit instead of building municipal internet

Ah yes, that municipal internet in the Pacific Ocean. The municipal internet in the 1 person per square mile rural area. The municipal internet to mountain villages. The municipal internet running to airplanes. The municipal internet to the Antarctic research stations.

Tell me you don’t know the point of satellite internet without telling me.

If you want to make arguments against sat constellations so people can make long exposure photos, go for it. But don’t pretend there are actual viable alternatives to LEO sat internet.

Dude your country is 98% desolate and unsuited to agriculture. If you want night sky go to a cabin literally anywhere in your unending and cold mountains instead of shutting down agriculture in the only marginal spot on the west coast you can grow food.

>It's quite depressing how little society values the night sky, something that's been an important part of every human culture for longer than recorded history.

But what if someone were uncomfortable briefly? Did you ever consider that? Technology exists to infantilize us while slowly ruining everything that makes us human. Shame on you for attempting to interrupt human progress.