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Comment by noja | Hacker News Reader

You'd expect better from Sky At Night.

(Wikipedia says -143 °C, -225 °F)

The attack on spacex at the start - the one company that’s actually likely to put sky at night readers on Mars - took me out of it before the 900C hilarity.

The star link complaint seems kind of like how people must have been when telegram/power lines went up.

Yeah, early above-ground telephone wiring was a horrible mess. This is one of those intermediate steps where the satellites are are awful. Even as they're implemented there should be a plan to get rid of them. If you search from pictures of overhead wires you can see what it was like for a while. https://uh.edu/engines/nycandwires.jpg

Astronomers, amateur or otherwise, have been complaining about "light pollution" forever. Traditionally, it's about night-time lighting on Earth that isn't shielded from transmitting light upwards.

It startled me to find (in a long ago HN thread) that people, presumably nerdy types, are not generally sympathetic to the complaints. I somehow assumed that universal lukewarm quasi-environmental feelings would mean people would go "yeah, lighting the night sky is inefficient and dumb, and astronomy makes pretty pictures" but apparently "fuck astronomers" is a popular opinion.

The kinds of people who like building things will be less sympathetic to environmental concerns when those concerns are 'don't build that, leave the world untainted by human hand'- there's a difference between polluting by building/placing something of value somewhere and polluting as a pure stupid ugly externality. Engineer-y people might be inclined to hate the latter but not the former.

The aspect of amateur astronomy culture that discouraged me was the awful code published in Sky & Telescope back in the late 80s or early 90s.

They used to have a policy that in order to be compatible with the least common denominator of their readers, they required published programs to be in BASIC. And not just BASIC, but basic BASIC, with line numbers.

As far as I was concerned, it was unreadable and obsolete since about 1985. It also probably influenced me away from ever learning Forth by association.

Not to mention, that when I got a book on astronomical computer algorithms, it turned out that the available implementations were in Fortran, which to my taste was as bad or worse.

Fortran is still popular in scientific computing, and modern compilers are pretty good.

Not only that, but modern compilers are insanely good at compiling numerical Fortran code. The very first optimizing compiler was for Fortran and it's consistently been on the forefront of compiler techniques ever since.

I know that's the cliche, but I don't think that something like VSOP87 would be noticeably faster compiled with Fortran vs. C, in the early 90s. If there even was a Fortran compiler available for Mac or Amiga, it was probably priced obscenely, too.

Well, that, and with modern machinery, a global investment economy, and so many construction jobs depending on infinite growth, "build that junk" is the no-brainer solution to everything. Problem is, just a couple "build that junk" people can do so much damage, unless checked by an unusual, overwhelming backlash, we're not slowing down in any measurable way any time soon.

> ...but apparently "fuck astronomers" is a popular opinion.

They know what they did.

(Leap seconds.)

fun fact - mars has great time zones. No silly country borders and also had them even before we had time zones on earth https://marscalendar.com/time-zones

We now know that light pollution also kills insects, which will in the long term also kill us.

Reducing it should therefore be a priority. Instead, it's increased worldwide, mainly thanks to cheap power LEDs.

Power lines still look like garbage, IMHO. After having lived some years in Germany where they are almost universally buried (except high voltage long-haul lines), I can't stop seeing them everywhere in the US. So ugly. Every sky and scene just spoiled with rickety old third-world "oh let's just put this here for now" trash. Like a scratch right across my eyeballs.

Not sure where in the USA you are looking. If it's in a seismically active region there could be factors other than cost and aesthetics. Here in Japan power lines are seldom buried for this reason.

I've been everywhere, man.

Although there are some areas where power (and comms) cables are buried, it is overwhelmingly common in the US for them to be pole-mounted.

That was simply SEO talking. There was no other way to shoehorn a link to their Starlink webpage into the article.

Astronomers, both amateur and professional, have a legit issue with starlink. SpaceX are even trying to mitigate the issue - because of astronomers pointing it out. So I can see nothing wrong in a magazine for hobby astronomers taking a jab at starlink.

According to the astronomer I talked to, starlink has a negligible impact on professionals. Some disruption at the beginning, but fairly easy to account for. There is already plenty of man made objects that need to be accounted for like the ISS, any of which could cause an issue but it’s a tiny fraction of data that’s impacted and therefore it can be removed fairly easily.

That said, amateur astronomers doing long exposure shots will likely be impacted.

Simply not true, starlink will have a real impact on research (see e.g. https://www.lsst.org/content/lsst-statement-regarding-increa... for the impact on LSST) and will make some science impossible to do. Ironically, amateur long exposure shots will be fine because amateur astronomy doesn’t rely on pixel-level brightnesses and you can easily subtract out streaks in a way that’s pleasing to the eye. Whether or not you think it’s justified, it’s not true to say this will not impact astronomy. Some science cases will be fine, others will be significantly impacted and still others will be SOL and impossible to do.

So the “Rubin Observatory is an extreme case for the sensitivity of astronomical observations to satellite constellations because of its unprecedented ability to repeatedly monitor the sky widely and deeply.”

And their worried about potentially losing as little as 0.3% of pixel level data, that sounds about right. I am not saying it’s impact is meaningless, just they could offset their impact with funding, rather than it being a massive issue on it’s own.

Why do you care? I'm not concern trolling, I just worry/(am curious about) that some people have a quasi-emotional connection with Musk's companies.

Trust but verify, as the saying goes.

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