“Just avoid the satellites” they said
twitter.com
twitter.com
[The following was the original flagged comment, which I'm leaving for completeness but shouldn't have posted as such]
Oh no, extremely long exposure photographs at certain wavelengths taken under select conditions need a small amount of additional post processing which is trivially automated. How dare those rural peasants who want to connect to the rest of humanity inconvenience us so!
The thing to do with such a provocation is to leave it where you found it and move on to more interesting things. Dragging it into the comments and setting it on fire is definitely not the thing to do. I know how tempting it is, though; it's a temptation we all need to cultivate resistance to, which is hard work.
Incidentally, the problem is a co-creation between comments and upvotes, and the upvotes are the greater factor. But there's no way to respond to the upvoters except by responding to the commenter. I try not to come across as picking on the commenter personally, but I know it can still feel that way.
The argument I've seen is that this stuff can be adjusted for and that most researchers have already had to adjust for it (since there are ~1500 non-Starlink satellites already). Is that just an utter fallacy?
https://twitter.com/GrumpyOldAstro/status/139637061036883149...
Essentially, they chose to multiply any light from all of the frames.
The other claim I've seen is that once the satellites reach their operational orbit (~4 months after launch), they are no longer visible.
I don't know if this has been proven/disproven yet. Curious if anyone in-the-know can comment.
In order to see 6th magnitude you need a very dark sky (no moon or clouds, low humidity, no human populations anywhere nearby), you would need to dark adapt for over 30 minutes with no viewing of any sources of light, you'd need to be pretty young, and then you'd need to use averted-vision viewing where you look near an object, but not directly at it such that you can use the higher density of rods in the rest of your eye in order to see the object. You'd then have a chance of seeing current Starlink satellites, but you'd see a ton of other satellites as well as there's many satellites above 6th magnitude. (In 2017 or so I was in rural Nebraska the night before the solar eclipse and it felt like there was a half dozen visible satellites in the sky at any given time.)
However that doesn't mean they're not visible to telescopes.
Obviously you can remove the satellite traces from the image, but each of them causes a degradation in quality, i.e. a reduction in the signal-to-noise ratio, because the light coming from the sky zones obscured by the satellites has not been captured by the sensors.
Regardless how well you might process the sky images, the large increase in the number of satellites will reduce their quality.
Right, this is the true statement of the issue. However is a _marginal_ loss in image data quality really not that bad a thing to ask for for getting internet across the planet effectively (in human history terms) overnight?
There's nothing of substance here, just more internet vitriol.
For example I think "rural people's best hope of finally not being an afterthought" is massive government infrastructure projects that don't factor in profitability. Note that I am not trying to _have_ this discussion here, just pointing out that it's a valid disagreement.
And the author of that tweet it seems considers this a loss of an ancient and fundamental shared planetary resource. I think anger is an understandable, even appropriate reaction to that perception!
The point is to get people to talk about it and maybe also not just accept the neoliberal consensus about the role of technology and infrastructure and their externalities. Seems to have succeeded by that measure.
There is plenty of substance here but you're using the author's anger and profanity as an excuse to not engage with it.
It's also clearly not a loss of an ancient planetary resource. The satellites can't be seen with the naked eye so the vast majority won't notice. Astral photographers and astronomers may have to do slightly more post-processing on certain types of images, but that hardly seems like a big deal.
That said, yes, we should focus on the big picture in places like HN. That doesn't mean we ignore or disparage the mere mortals who care so much about the sky.
A follow-up tweet[0] says "If you take the 2-hr video and stack the images, the astronomical wonders appear to get lost behind the web of satellite trails. 60s exposures, 4.4degX4.4deg", but was there some astronomical objective behind stacking 2 hours worth of frames, or was this just done to create a pretty/scary picture?
[0] https://twitter.com/RAOastronomy/status/1395968612385529858
It is way too early to call this a "failure" and the problem here is not Musk himself doing this but the governmental regulation that allows it. If Musk wasn't putting up these satellites, someone else would. Maybe not today, but eventually.
As a society we need to do a better job blaming the systems that allow something to happen rather than the individuals who exist in and use that system.
In either case adding "Elon Musk's X" into the title is clickbait and should not be done, for positive or negative news.
Many years ago I have worked as a designer of equipment for long-distance wireless communication links for Internet access.
I have no doubt that it would be possible to cover all the remote areas of USA with a network of towers with directional antennas for the links between themselves at a lower cost and with better performance than SpaceX's constellation of satellites.
The reason why this has not been done is not technical. The fact that the communication services offered by SpaceX are more advantageous than the alternatives available in USA is a historical accident, not something caused by objective reality.
The difference between the solution implemented by SpaceX and a ground-based solution is that to be able to provide their services SpaceX occupies resources that they do not own.
The sky does not belong to SpaceX, I and billions of other humans who will never use the services of SpaceX have as much rights to the sky as the SpaceX customers, so SpaceX is stealing from us to serve their customers.
This is the same like someone who chooses to smoke in a public place besides me. I do not care if he smokes at his home, that is his right, but if he smokes besides me and forces me to inhale his smoke, I consider that an aggression.
In the same way, occupying the sky with satellites is a nuisance and an aggression towards all those who are not SpaceX customers and who have not agreed that SpaceX may use in this way something that belongs to all humans, not to an US company or to an US agency.
You can find his letter on the FCC licensing page, here:
https://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=...
One thing he points out is that while he has broadband, something meeting the minimal definition costs $500 a month.
A nice thing about Starlink is that it will be able to cover the US and the rest of the world, and provide an upper limit to the price of broadband. And it's timeframe is not that far off - they will have about 6,000 satellites deployed in 2024, and all 12,000 deployed by 2027.
This doesn't prevent them from looking outwards towards the surrounding space. It just makes the data a bit more noisy once processing is completed. It doesn't completely obscure anything (unless that thing was incredibly faint and near the noise floor anyway).
> while for Internet access there are many alternatives both cheaper and faster than a network of satellites.
If there were "many alternatives both cheaper and faster", people would not be going literally crazy over waiting for the service to become available at their premises. You can see such people moping and complaining on threads everywhere while they wait for service to become available. For the market where Starlink is wanted there are often no options that are faster and in some cases not even any options that are cheaper. I've heard several anecdotes of people who were paying $200+ a month for around 1 mbps for internet service before they got Starlink.
The Supreme Court sided with Verizon, who said basically "fiber is too expensive for us to be able to deploy, unless we get a monopoly over the infrastructure we build".
This has lead to enormous stagnation. DSL remained a competitive service, with a variety of competing entities, in the 90's & early aughts, because it still remained under the Telecommunications Act, of unbundled network elements, because of unbundled local loops. As soon as one company was allowed to own the infrastructure & every means to connect over it, the system of competition & innovation that had been working went away.
Now a days we have municipal service providers getting started. They too will exist in these same terms, as local infrastructure monopolies. They won't have a regulatory framework that systems like POTS / copper have, won't have any standards for cooperation / competition, since fiber as a whole has never been unbundled. Overall, I see this as a great potential weakness for municipal isps, and it's something I think the left & right might be interested in rectifying. It could be done municipality by municipality, with promises, but I for one think many people on many sides of the political spectrum have an interest in fixing this radical overreach & colossal corporate favoritism that was gifted by the Supreme Court.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._v....
Building physical infrastructure isn't without environmental cost.
I don't think this is true really. There's been a really big shift in the last 50-ish years and at least in the US there seems to be a general consensus that projects of this nature are no longer the domain of the government.
I mean the telecom thing is a factor sure but I don't think you'd see that level of investment in infrastructure for anything else at this point either.
The tweeter also complains about the high price of space based telescopes, but neglects that starlink funds (or will fund) Space X which may substantially reduce the cost of putting up big space telescopes in the future.
If what you want is an accurate view of the sky, then no: once you've taken the picture with the satellite in it, any technique that removes the satellite cannot add back in what it obscured by taking up space in the picture.
Image editing cannot make this better for science, only for art.
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/astrophotography/astropho...
As a non-astronomer my curiosity is, given publicly available ephemera for the microsat constellations, could a post-processing stage reasonably remove their streaks from the exposures being summed together?
Granted this would probably only be feasible for non-hobbyists.
Also, maybe he just doesn't know about PixInsight... https://pixinsight.com/
This really seems like a UX problem. We’re trained in the UX of long exposure film, and tools to do it differently aren’t built into the cameras these people use.
Pretty sure the iPhone’s long exposure doesn’t amplify moving objects
That said, let’s tax satellites and fund, I dunno, space cleanup or astronomy or some such. Maybe treat space more like an earth wide resource and less like the Wild West.
In that spirit, we should avoiding breaking things and polluting common resources, even if we can’t obviously see what the damage is.
I really do wonder if Kessler syndrome will happen, with the amount of cheap&cheerful stuff we are sending into space.
> Space should be decided over by everyone.
I would disagree.
If China/Russia/Iran/North Korea launches a lot of satellites is that okay too? What if they mainly fly around above the US for whatever reason? If space is free the US can't complain.
This has been already been happening since the Cold War. So yes, the US is used to it.
Why does the sky only belong to researchers and not all of humanity? The number of humans interested in faster internet far exceeds the number of humans interested in earth-based telescopes.
Starlink does theoretically solve the problem of internet access for everyone, everywhere. At once.
The sky is beautiful and free for anyone who can look up towards it.
There are several other competitors with satellites already in orbit or launches scheduled. So, assuming there is no collusion, competitive pressure should ameliorate a lot of the concerns about concentration of control.
Some of the competitors are even partly owned by governments (e.g. OneWeb and the UK govt) and thus look slightly more like a public utility.
If we see said one man actually controlling who has access, I think that's an appropriate time to take issue, and I expect many people would take issue.
Starlink/OneWeb/Kuiper solve a much bigger problem than just rural US coverage.
> land based solutions will always be lower latency/faster if built right
Not necessarily true due to the speed of transmission in fiber vs. speed of light in vacuum (once the Starlink laser links are set up).
Such as? The only use cases it addresses are upper class users who want to go off-grid, and state/military operations (Already being tested by US forces btw).
> Not necessarily true due to the speed of transmission in fiber vs. speed of light in vacuum (once the Starlink laser links are set up).
Absolutely misleading argument. I can push a trickle of water at the speed of light it would still not allow me to watch netflix in 4k. The issue with satellite internet is channel capacity.
Also bandwith wise the satellite has to keep plexing between all user nodes in it's range. You go beyond a few thousands users and your speed starts dropping. that can only be addressed by adding more and more satellites, where do you stop?
There are a lot of close-to-poverty-line indigenous communities in the US and Canada adopting Starlink. e.g.:
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/10/remot...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-starlink-internet-fir...
There are already loads of NGOs (e.g. [3]) operating in rural developing nations to install solar power for village community centers. It's a small step to install a shared satellite internet terminal at the same time.
The jump in quality of life and opportunities from zero connectivity to a 100MBps shared village link is massive. You hugely expand access to telehealth, weather information, education opportunities, etc.
Unfortunately photos often distort reality, (which is the author's intent here). They purposefully stacked the multiple images in such a way to amplify the satellites clarity, rather than stacking them in a way that would instead have resulted in a clear sky but a slightly elevated noise floor.
Lets say, maybe a couple of Astronomy PHds students whose thesis just got ruined, could start a new SETI project. Or more light and gravity studies of Einstein findings :-) I would guess a couple of lasers randomly firing upwards from an Telescope site could not possibly cause issues for low earth satellites, could it ? ;-)
The satellites are actively controlled and can be commanded to deorbit. If a court ordered it (incredibly unlikely), SpaceX could immediately order all the satellites to deorbit. This is a reversible situation if such a need arose.
The environmental argument is an interesting one and i have no idea on the total lifetime damage of both solutions. The heaviest digging will be required where there are humans living any way. Laying cables and maintenance while probably more expensive also has some benefits such a high paying jobs, distributed all over the world instead of increasing the worlds Gini coefficient further. I would recognize Starlink as a good idea (outweighing the negatives) if it would be public infrastructure but that train has sailed.
"Here, hold my beer..." - Elon Musk
Also, the picture shared seems pretty clickbaity. Not sure who took it but they must be amateurs if they can't mask objects obviously moving on known orbits between frames.
Also, the answer to your question is that researchers don't ruin the sky for everyone.
0. https://www.theverge.com/22435030/starlink-satellite-interne...
The problem with broadband in the US is not technical, and it's not solely distances or the nature of rural spaces. It's political and economic. We managed to deliver electricity and then telephone to everyone with a push from the federal government, we could do it again.
But now AT&T, Comcast and Time-Warner are too powerful, so we end up with ground-based telescopes suffering instead.
0. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160314/09374733901/isps-...
Please don't use hyperbole like this as some people believe it and it confuses the conversation. Starlink will not erase the night sky. Starlink in operational orbits is not human eye visible. This is only a concern for ground based telescopes, not the average person viewing the night sky.
In the end, politicians with enough will to stand up to the terrible telco conglomerates currently holding back rural broadband would be a better answer here in the US, no need to pollute the sky. Launch a federal program like those that ensured electricity and telephone to every rural customer, with a generous minimum speed, and customers for Starlink in the US drop to near-zero.
Yeah many Starlink customers do exactly that or hire someone to do that for them. They've had to do similar drastic measures in many cases to even get service at all via microwave antennas on tall towers or LTE antennas on tall towers or other such things. The guy wasn't desperate for good internet, which is why he didn't feel it was worth it.
Everything you say was described in the Verge article by the author, so I don't see how the article is inaccurate or should be avoided.
Also I find it hard to say "100+ mbps with 95%+ uptime (improving with time) for $100/month" as "mediocre service". That's quite good service and revolutionary service for the people unmet by other services. Even if you need to do a bit of handiwork (much more common in rural areas) to get it installed.
If you put dangerous[1][2] garbage in the sky you should have some responsibility to keep it safe and clean up.
IMHO the risk of putting these things up outweigh any potential benefit for underserved regions. Musk could've also invested in ground-based communications infrastructure.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS1ibDImAYU
Secondly, the Kessler syndrome is believed to already be happening by some, but it's a slow process that occurs over 10s to 100s of years and doesn't result in any of the popular depictions like in Gravity or in Wall-e. The Kessler syndrome also does not happen at altitudes where debris are rapidly removed by the atmosphere, which is where Starlink operates in. So even if you were to spontaneously blow up all the Starlink satellites (not at all realistic), the debris would be largely removed after less than a decade.
Thirdly, as mentioned Starlink operates specifically in a region of space that is reasonably rapidly (within the order of a few years) cleared up of any non-functioning satellites or debris.
Fourthly, you can't call operational satellites with the ability to actively avoid debris and other satellites "dangerous garbage". You could use that term for cubesats with no on-board propulsion possibly, but not Starlink.
> IMHO the risk of putting these things up outweigh any potential benefit for underserved regions.
The risk is overstated and it's easy to ignore the benefits if it doesn't improve your own life.
> Musk could've also invested in ground-based communications infrastructure.
If it was so cheap to improve ground-based communications infrastructure it would have been done already. (And it has been in most areas of many European countries because of the density of their populations, but that's not true everywhere)