alt Hacker NewsImage of our satellite-choked night skies
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This is awesome. How far we have come in the last century. How much farther we have to go. We will conquer the skies, and then the stars.
I remember thinking when I was a child how exciting the future was going to be. I had a bunch of these books talking about space and ships and stuff. Well, the future lived up to billing. We got there.
A lot of people are going to look at that manually edited image, think it's a traditional long-exposure photo, and conclude that satellites are much more of a problem for astronomy than they really are.
The photographer made a really neat picture, but Kottke is presenting it with a headline that suggests its something else, and generally not giving enough context (mostly just blockquotes).
Something doesn't right to me. Shouldn't the streaks vary more in their length? They all seem really similar, which given the set time of 8 seconds would mean the speed to relative distance relationship would have to be near constant for all. Some of the ones on an approaching/departing path seem to show a small variation. But are none of these on an elliptical orbit with the appogee in view? Should have a much bigger variation, I would think?
I like seeing satellites at night. The first time I saw one was during a family trip to watch a meteor shower. As we watched for meteors, my dad pointed out a passing satellite. Then he told me a story of how in his youth, satellites were so rare and new that the local newspapers would publish when one was going to pass over the area so folks could go out and spot it.
On that camping trip, I think we only noticed the one satellite. 20 years later, I can now go in my front yard and see several satellites every few minutes, and point them out to my kids, and retell the story their grandfather told me.
The hard part came next. Larsen spent about 45 hours layering the individual photos – each of which contained about 25 satellites – over one another, using Adobe Photoshop. Much of the time was spent painstakingly erasing stars, to reveal the satellites.
This is less an "image of our satellite-choked night skies" and more "a completely mendacious image produced using Photoshop".
I remember when this was more of a theoretical problem :( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128726 compare when i made that comment in 2020 https://satellitemap.space/s/8Tu9xcHa
I want to thank those little guys up there for google maps, internet, tv, weather, rescues, whatever else they do. Put up some more.
It is a bit ridiculous these days and it's only going to get worse with basically every major country needing to do a version of this for defence purposes.
Go out tonight and just look at the sky for 5 mins and I'll guarantee you'll see a couple of satellites flying past.
As with a lot of other technologies, the genie is out of the bottle and I don't think we're putting him back there again, this is the future.
It looks like low earth orbit is a limited resource. Is it?
If so, do Starlink and others pay rent? Should they (to ensure efficient use of the resource)?
it seems fairly evenly distributed besides the aggregation in the middle, what orbit would that be? why are there so many satellites there?
Looks like some of the first 8-bit Moiré pattern demos.
Makes perfect sense.
ouch more dishes than a tapas bar
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A few things:
Satellites are only visible shortly after sunset and before sunrise, known as astronomical twilight.
If the images in the photograph upset you and you think our night sky is ruined, the thing that kills it the most is light pollution. Flood lights, parking lights, and street lights that don’t direct light down to the ground make viewing much worse than satellites for everybody.
It’s just as easy to capture incredible images of the night sky, even during astronomical twilight, with image processing. Here’s photos I’ve captured in my driveway in the SF Bay Area: https://bradgessler.github.io/observatory-blog/observations/
I captured said images with an Elixir software stack I installed on a Pi and hooked up to my telescope. It’s open-source at https://github.com/bradgessler/observatory for those who are interested. I hook Claude up to it and it runs observations for the night, processes images with deterministic tools, and publishes them as the night progresses.