Trails Made by Starlink Satellites | Hacker News Reader

Trails Made by Starlink Satellites

iau.org

69 pointstbeutel27 comments

Here's a statement [1] by one of the largest upcoming surveys, LSST. At least for them, this isn't going to be too much of a problem as,

1) Exposures are fairly short and frequent and so pixels contaminated by these satellites can be easily rejected. 2) There is a huge amount of resources (relative to other projects) going into the image pipeline for this project.

I don't actually know in details how much this will affect other types of observations though. [2] is the IAU's statement (that goes with that image), which points out some types of observations that might be more affected.

[1] https://www.lsst.org/content/lsst-statement-regarding-increa... [2] https://www.iau.org/news/announcements/detail/ann19035/

It's great that the LSST can survive this, but there's not much point to building it if all the spectroscopy follow up is killed by efforts to put facebook in front of every face in the world.

Spectroscopy is the fundament on which modern astronomy is built, and it inherently takes long times even with big mirrors. Getting a satellite in the field of view as you take your spectrum most likely means having to start over, and you run out of usable darkness faster.

If it can be cheap enough to send 10s of thousands of internet satellites into orbit every 5 years perhaps the same innovation will help drive cheaper space based observance where light pollution, radio pollution, satellite/airplane streaks, and usable darkness aren't a problem.

The problem is size. The proposed constellations are possible because of small satellites. It's much easier to build a large telescope on the ground than it is in space. I don't see the small satellite revolution changing this.

No, you either do spectra slowly or with large mirrors, no amount of ad spend will change the physical reality.

What about space implies fast? Sitting equipment at L2 is all the rage these days and SpaceX has launched there before.

Not that I think this particular case wouldn't work in LEO, just for things that wouldn't there are much better options - we just have historically had trouble getting there affordably/reliably enough to make it worth while.

> What about space implies fast?

Oh, sorry, I though you were going to argue that we don't have to put science on hold just to let all the world stream gagnam style via Elon owned infrastructure.

In any case, a single SpaceX heavy costs about the same as 9 2.5 m telescopes, so good luck making the argument that science won't suffer.

If you put a science instrument in space, you do it because it's the only option, not because Elon says so.

Do you actually want to talk about the real world impacts of this or have you already made up your mind? What your saying is going against what the captions on the image from the IAU site point to and seems to have more to do with your personal opinion of Elon than the actual merits of space based astronomy or the impacts of satellites on ground based astronomy.

pretty snarky to suggest facebook is the only way developing countries would utilise the internet. access to knowledge to better their lives, even turn them into astronomers perhaps

An argument could be made that the "access to knowledge" does mostly not require the high bandwidths which are being provided as the selling point of the Starlink satellites. Surely most parts of the world already have access to internet via mobile phones, existing communication satellites, or the access could be provided for much lower costs than with Starlink, by creating new infrastructure on the ground.

“Although this image serves as an illustration of the impact of reflections from satellite constellations, please note that the density of these satellites is significantly higher in the days after launch (as seen here) and also that the satellites will diminish in brightness as they reach their final orbital altitude.”

I've never seen a caption on a photo be so blatantly pleading with internet commenters to not get angry.

Also, not mentioned, satellite trails are only an issue just around twilight and only near the horizons, both of which are bad seeing conditions for telescopes.

"Just" being several hours, cutting shorter the finite amount of dark time available.

Several hours at increasingly lower inclinations as satellites in LEO reflecting sunlight are low in the sky. Telescopes generally don’t point in that direction because of the amount of atmosphere makes for bad seeing.

It's worth pointing out that airplane and satellite trails have long been a problem in astrophotography, and there's many techniques that exist to remove them in the stacking process.

Damn it, can’t the entire country be wired with fiber? It was done 100 years ago with heavy conductors for electrification, then again with twisted copper pair for phone, but now in the 21st century no one can do shit.

Save wireless for what it’s actually useful for, mobile and extremely remote use.

1. This is the entire world, not the entire country.

2. In order to have wireless available for extremely remote use, it has to be everywhere.

3. The bandwidth that is planned will not be enough for more than a small percentage of traffic in dense urban areas.

Here in New Zealand the Government just did this.

The answer is No because your local friendly NIMBY will kill such a project for some asinine reason.

I tried laying fiber to an island in Canada. The locals were ecstatic about it, the telco did what they could to block it, then, when it was clear we were going to succeed they finally put in minimal broadband for the one village within the area we were going to cover killing all economies of scale that we might have found.

NIMBY had nothing to do with it.

You could’ve signed up the people in advance into a yearly contract before even starting the build (with fair clauses that they can opt out at no charge if the service turns out different than expected, etc).

It doesn't make sense for the average individual homeowner to sign something like this. It's also very difficult to do a fair clause for service quality that works at scale for a contended residential service.

Also a one-year contract still doesn't protect you from them setting predatory pricing for expiring contracts the next year. A large telco can play many games of attrition that are very hard for a small (non-VC) startup to win.

> your local friendly NIMBY

I think you misspelled "telecom lobby"...

https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...

It can be both. 'Baptists and bootleggers'.

Read an article saying that we might not see stars anymore...'gazillions' of satellites will be launched in space over time.

I live in a big city and never see the stars now.

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