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Comment by ohmyzee | Hacker News Reader

As much as I love this type of app, I can't help but feel depressed that before we know it there will be an app that does the opposite. We are allowing governments and billionaires to pollute our view of the cosmos. The night sky is such an important part of the human experience and most people never experience it in all its beauty. Allowing American business owners and world militaries to block it from above just makes my stomach turn if I am honest.

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this reply is nothing but hyperbole and fear mongering - I've been out in a very rural dark sky location and seen a group of starlink satellites going past. they did not obscur or brighten the view of any stars. If you really want to be concerned about something, worry about light pollution in urban areas, or people polluting the atmosphere. I'm sure the folks living in the grey smog of haze in Lahore or Mexico City would be more concerned about breathing clean air, and having clean air to use a telescope if they wanted to, than occasionally seeing a satellite flying past.

I disagree that this is hyperbolic -- to be in the wilderness is to be alone and away from humanity. A starlink train is a stark expression that one can never really be alone anymore.

When I was a kid, it was a fun/rare occurrence to see the occasional satellite -- they were more common than the night's meteors, but not by more than a factor of ten or so. Today, there are oodles.

in my mind, a starlink train is a "oh, neat, look at that", same as seeing a collection of meteors, it's not like a diesel-electric locomotive suddenly appears in your wilderness...

You can only see the trains around sunset and that only a while after launch.

Light pollution from cities is much bigger deal than satellites though, isn't it?

There are already apps for finding out where to go to avoid it, like https://www.darkskymap.com/. As well as just websites like https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/

On the bright side (pun intended), the easier it is to put things in space, the closer we'll be to being able to - whenever we fancy - get to an altitude where those satellites are below us, so to speak :)

So I feel like this is a self-correcting problem, in a sense. We need more astronomy capability in-orbit (and beyond!), and it'd sure be nice if we as humans could chill out up there and do it ourselves, with our own eyes, unhindered by any planetary atmosphere. The proliferation of LEO satellites only serves as further motivation toward that goal.

Internet access is vastly more important than our view of the night sky.

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