Honestly I hope someone figures out how to shoot these down. I feel like the planet isn't getting a say. In fact only a few people are getting a say that this network should even exist. Astronomy is dead. A dark sky with just stars, yeah dead.
We're prioritizing yet another billionare's networking business over the capacity to study our night's sky. Much like other types of pollution, this is something that could stick around for hundreds of years, even after all its utility is gone.
Cell towers, like most structures, can be brought down, repurposed, updated and altered. We can't do nothing about satellites, and don't know how to clean space pollution.
Oh, I see. That explains things, thanks!
And yes, time zones are not just one kind of bonkers; they're all sorts of bonkers. :)
Starlink is here not because it makes a networking business (although it doesn't hurt).
Starlink is here because on Mars you need reliable communication and positioning over the planet, and you can only do that efficiently with satellites, and Starlink is destined for Mars, not Earth. What we have here is just the testing grounds for the technology.
Personally I'm stoked about pushing 1200 sattelites in orbit to Mars - highly automated, and it would make the current 2 orbiters by NASA as peanuts.
We are talking about a extremely tiny part of the sky that will only be visible very infrequently and the position is known at all times.
This does not impact most of astronomy at all.
Cleaning up space is not a technically impossible problem. It just has not yet been done because nobody had a need for it.
The waste majority of these satellites would fall back to earth, they can not stay 100s of years even in the worst case. Those few that do actually break and are to high up to wait out, can be collected once we have the scale of launch and service infrastructure. Until that point they would be on known location and SpaceX could make sure they don't hit anything.
It seems utterly absurd to me to ignore a massive technological leap for humanity because a tiny part of it hurts research (or is assumed to possible hurt research) and the idea that there is not enough space in orbit and that is not convincing at all.
A few thousand astronomers disagree with your statement: https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/global-astrono...
tl;dr: starlink and its competitors pose serious Earth-based observation problems across the spectrum (§§4.1-4.2) especially for faint variable objects which require long exposures and for which any missed pixels matter.
The missed-pixels problems run around the clock, not just when the sattelites are visibly flaring, as do non-visible-spectrum noise problems.
Dead-simple algorithms to erase satellite trails are available for hobbyists right now: https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-blogs/imaging-foun...
And more complex ones for professional astronomers should still be super simple to implement compared to many of the algorithms astronomers have to wrangle with.
The objects in question are often extremely faint, and even if one knows a lot of the details of periodic noise, removing the noise does not recover the faint signal.
> baffling
Stand by, there will be lot of professional science communication on this topic in due course.
> moon, 1%, ...
Suppose right now at the very limb of the sun we detect an extremely interesting light curve that is clearly not extragalactic yet still atypical of supernovae, but know that it is in the process of moving directly behind the sun (from our perspective). How do you propose to remove the sun from the image of the suspected supernova?
Here's a list of solar-system objects that moved directly behind the sun in 2019: https://sungrazer.nrl.navy.mil/index.php?p=transits/transits... This Christmas would have been an interesting time for 2010: The Year We Make Contact's great black spot of Jupiter to appear.
The moon also occults Jupiter fairly regularly. If Jupiter was doing something strange behind the moon, think of the loss for all the Earth-based observatories. Or would it be trivial for them to faithfully reconstruct the unusual behaviour of Jupiter?
Yes, the sun and moon are slow-moving, bright, and high-solid-angle obstructions compared to any spacecraft. However, so is Jupiter and a galactic supernova, and neither of them are usually interestingly variable on the scale of a glitching millisecond pulsar (for example) or the electromagnetic counterparts to a gravitational wave detection.
In short
> algorithms to erase satellite trails
are doing cosmetics, not astronomical or astrophysical research.
And if cosmetically you erase the wrong pixel, you miss out lots of observation time of events like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASASSN-15lh#Discovery and end up regretting missing early data (as in e.g. SN 1997D).
http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/asassn/index.shtml exists to avoid missing out on such things again, and if you have a thick skin, there's https://twitter.com/SuperASASSN
A recent tweet is interesting: 'This is, by the way, a discovery made in "astronomical twilight" - one way Itagaki and other amateur astronomers can discovered such events before professional astronomers is by observing fields (galaxies) quite close to the Sun.' (although that's in large part because bigger observatories deliberately aim away from the sun, because it's very noisy and its luminosity may damage sensitive detectors).
There are very few non-periodic events in the universe that happen over the fraction-of-a-second timescale for which a satellite occludes an area of the sky, the linking of EM to gravitational wave events being perhaps the only notable exception. Meteor impacts on planets happen over the course of seconds. Supernovae occur over the timeframe of hours. Glitches in millisecond pulsars (the millisecond name notwithstanding) occur over the timescale of days.
This is also the issue with using occlusion by the sun and moon as analogy - their occlusions do operate on the timescale of interesting astronomical events. If the moon whipped around the Earth at the same rate as LEO satellites it might occlude Jupiter, but you would have plenty of vision between the shutters to reconstruct events on the timescales we are interested in. I'll also note that the analogy breaks down with the focus on objects in the solar system since they all roughly lie on the ecliptic - you've reduced the occlusions over a 2D sky to occlusions between objects that live on a 1D slice of it. The Sun and Moon both take up 0.3% of the angular diameter of the sky, but only 0.001% the angular area.
Are you losing real data with a sky full of 10's of thousands of LEO satellites? Yes. Is it a significant amount? Not by any reasonable metric. Is it over a significant timescale? No.
An analogy: If you have some video footage and for whatever reason have a punchhole in the corner of every 100th frame, that by no means precludes you from doing analysis on the video. I'd expect the video conservationists to be up in arms about any blemishes on their original film, but I'd argue that that is the position from aesthetics. To answer questions such as "how many times does the ball in this video bounce" or "how does the lighting in this video change over time" or "how does that person's hair react to the wind visible in the video" the hole is insignificant to obtaining the answer, even if the area of interest is directly covered every 100th frame.
I'll close with the acknowledgement that radio interference is a legitimate concern here. But satellites are hardly the only emitters which are increasing in number at an increasing rate, and that commons will be polluted whether we launch them or not.
No, a website that tells you when it's coming, ooooh... No this is every single night, and morning, a grid from HELL.
I'm a fairly regular poster, a software engineer, decently intelligent guy - and this future absolutely disgusts me. I hope things change and it ends up not happening. I would rather telephone pole the world.
Most people will never even notice those satellites.