Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

> if we’re going to go into a future where you end up losing 30 to 60 minutes, that would be a significant chunk of our observing time through the night

As this comment implies, the worst case impact to astronomy is only going to be about 30 to 60 minutes lost per night right after dusk and before dawn. There will still be uninterrupted viewing time in the middle of the night because the satellites will be in Earth's shadow and not visible at all.

Personally, I think the benefit of truly global broadband internet from space is worth the cost of an hour of observing time per night. Even in the worst case, ground based astronomy can still happen. "Despair" is not warranted.

On a related note, I made a website to predict when the Starlink satellites will be visible for you. They look pretty cool if you can catch them, but viewing opportunities are limited because of that limited time window before they enter Earth's shadow. https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/?special=starlink-201...

> Personally, I think the benefit of truly global broadband internet from space is worth the cost of an hour of observing time per night.

SpaceX isn't the going to be the last company or nation state to put up a network of satellites like this.

Do you have any reason to believe that additional satellites would alter the geometry of the Earth so that they would be visible for longer after sunset?

would larger objects, or ones at a larger orbit be visible longer?

admittedly, i dont know much about space stuffs. :)

at a higher orbit their brightness will be less, but they will be illuminated longer and visible from more of the planet. Assuming a constant average reflectivity, larger objects will be more visible.

Satellites at higher orbit will be visible longer after sunset, both because they'll be in sunlight for a larger part of their orbit and because they'll be visible (above the horizon) to observers further away. The train is currently at about half of the satellites' intended final altitude.

This is what concerns me - either a tragedy of the commons as multiple companies and countries rush to be players in this market, or a monopoly for the first mover.

I would prefer some sort of global co-operative effort with standards and oversight so satellites are interchangeable, and supplied/deployed under a contract which shares the revenue.

  the satellites will be in Earth's shadow and not visible at all

They'll still obscure any small/faint objects they transit. They aren't transparent.

They're not transparent, but they might as well be. They are small and very far away and most importantly moving at extremely high speed. I calculate that a satellite could obscure a small object of interest for at most a few microseconds. Considering that astronomy exposure times are often measured in minutes, this is absolutely a non-issue.

are them visible by naked eye? site indicates a good opportunity at a not too bad of a time

They may be, depending on their orientation and position relative to the sun. I haven't seen them yet myself, but there are plenty of reports and videos of people seeing them. I haven't yet figured out how to accurately calculate how bright they will be.

That website is very cool.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com