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Oh great, another place where science and unchecked capitalism will clash. I wonder who the governments will support this time!
If only there were regulations for this sort of thing…
Wait until they start to orbit in formations representing company logos and serving us advertisements from space…
I said this once
I said this twice
I said this thrice
I said this everytime starlink was discussed
Maybe now they will listen
Maybe now they will care
In the next decade we will have maybe a dozen companies or entities with mega constellations like starlink, this issue will only get worse not better. Ground based astronomy for scientific purposes seems like it’s reached the end of being feasible.
I started doing amateur astrophotography last year with a camera, lens and startracker.
The way it works is you take dozens or hundreds of photos of the same thing, then combine them into one final image, a process called “stacking”.
To gather faint light, each photo is a long exposure gathering light for 30 - 120 seconds.
I have therefore taken over 20.000 long exposure shots of the night sky, pointing at different things, using wider and narrower lenses and NOT ONE SINGLE CLICK came without a Starlink streaking across the frame.
I’m a nobody using my phone to take the occasional image stack using Google’s “night sight” mode on my Pixel 7 Pro. Out of the 30 or so pictures I’ve taken, one has a Starlink Trail.
Not necessarily a “starlink trail” you took a photo of a satellite, could be starlink could be something else. Also the astrophotography mode on the pixels is purdy cool and fun to mess around with
I saw it with my eyes. It was without a doubt a string of 9 Starlink satellites. If you look closely, the image is a composite of multiple trails in a nearly colinear path.
What focal length do you normally shoot at? My rig is at 610mm and I get satellite trails mostly around dusk/dawn, but they all get rejected out during stacking
12/35mm for wide / nightscape shots, 135mm for regular wide field and 500mm for deep sky-ish stuff.
My sensor is APS-C, so the “effective” focal length is 1.5x the above lens values
Yeah, sadly this has become normal. The polution rate has reached ~100%. And sure, you already artificially build the final image anyways, but with Starlink, this has become a necessity. You can no longer take any individual shots, as they’re all just Starlink streaks.
That’s fucking crazy, especially to think this wasn’t even a problem (on the same scale) more than 5 years ago.
It is crazy, and as I said in another comment this is going to be exponential. We will have many mega constellations like starlink in the next decade.
That’s actually incredibly sad. Damn.
What other objects interfered? The ISS i assume.
The ISS is visible from any single point you’re standing on for up to about a minute when passing directly overhead and then the next orbit isn’t close enough for you to see.
Some comm and weather sats here and there but really nothing crazy. It was even fun to have individual shots with a streak on it cause it was a relatively rare occasion.
Now there’s just no hiding from it. Yes, the process of stacking images averages out the streaks in the final image, but for the average person with a wide lens taking a milky way shot during summer camping it’s basically impossible to not have like 5 streaks on it.
Damn :(
Sadly I blame everyone but starlink. It provides internet to rural areas that otherwise don’t have any viable high speed internet. Feds and states should have done anything to make sure these areas were being served. They weren’t and as a result $120/mo internet is reasonable.
Rural UK here. Tiny country in comparison to the US. Our village has no mobile signal. Our landline internet maxes out at 1mbit up and 10mbit down. We are 3miles from a town with 15k people. Why is there no infrastructure? I’m completely dependent on Starlink.
You speak about the US but it fucked the sky up for the entire planet, for all of us.
They never mentioned the US. Starlink serves the entire globe. Right above your comment is someone in the UK that uses Starlink.
That’s the main issue I see here, too. If you can provide this without the side effect, per-country, sure. Go ahead. Cool service.
This is such a shitty take.
He’s kinda right though…
Remember when the US govt. provided incentives for major ISPs to upgrade\expand their service and they just kinda pocketed the money and did nothing? Imagine if they didn’t. We may not have had a need for starlink.
Imagine 7.700.000.000 people not living in the US
Starlink has customers in 99 countries as of March. It’s a global service.
well maybe your right, maybe slowing down research and impeding the scientific progress of the human race is a small price to pay for getting Grandma in Bumfuck, Montana onto Facebook, and maybe these so called scientists should stop poking around the universe anyway, right ?
Isn’t Starlink a major player in getting high speed Internet to developing nations? I’m as mad as you about ruining the sky, but it’s not just Grandma it’s also entire villages in the global south.
Like light pollution wasn’t bad enough now literally satellites are fucking it up for us. How depressing.
Blow that piece of junk OUT OF THE SKY!
Where better to base your operation if your business mode is lawlessness. ?
What did you expect would happen when we became a space faring species? This is a good thing, we might not have as good of pictures for a while but honestly earth based telescopes were never going to match space based telescopes and commercialized space travel is how well get there.
TLDR: This is a good thing.
Hey we are a land dweller species, why don’t we dry out the ocean to make more room, eventually we figure it out.
Not really: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome And then you will have other corporations and other countries that want to put up their own swarms of satellites, china don’t want to be reliant on a US system for example.
Kessler syndrome isn’t really that much of a risk specifically with Starlink (for now at least), as SpaceX seems to be doing things right despite Musk. They’re in such low orbits that even with a catastrophic loss of control, they’ll deorbit very quickly. The real risk comes as more companies and countries try to get a piece of the megaconstellation pie. Starlink in its own seems to be fairly safe and sustainable on its own, but that may quickly change when communication for collision avoidance maneuvers needs to be international.
Despite Musk’s well-earned reputation for being a shithead, SpaceX has this far been doing the right thing far more often than most other space companies, and while it’s certainly possible that will change, the Starlink constellation will entirely disappear very quickly without constant replenishment, so it’s not as if we’d have no chance to act if they begin to show signs of concerning behavior. What’s far more worrying to me in terms of Kessler syndrome is the recent escalation around space warfare, as tensions between Russia, China, and the US continue to boil and nobody seems willing to really commit to making space a neutral zone. Even with space historically being an area of strong international cooperation despite politics (just look at the ISS), that unfortunately seems to be rapidly changing.
Ok, so this is a risk, that changes nothing, we have a choice either we use space or we don’t, if we don’t we gain nothing if we do we gain something, ergo we should use space.
What is the point of looking at the pretty lights in the sky if we have no plans on ever going there? You might as well generate images with Ai.
and commercialized space travel is how well get there.
Where there and how?
We’re in a new space race.
There are too many rocket companies to list. This commercialization drives down launch costs and increases capacity, which benefits private companies and public research institutions.
There was just a record number of people in orbit (19) that’ll get broken again in the coming years. The ISS will get new modules. Tiangong has been expanding. The Lunar Gateway station is under construction. Several private space stations are under construction. And multiple companies and countries are working on new crewed vehicles.
The ISS will get new modules.
And yet no one thought about skipping the gravity well and mine/process asteroids… baby steps i guess.
Yeah, Axiom is working on a private space station that would bud off the ISS when it deorbits. Although they have some money problems right now.
For asteroid mining, look up AstroForge. They’re working on mining platinum group metals from near Earth m-type asteroids. They launched a forge demo sat and soon will launch an asteroid RPO demo sat.
