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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

LEO satellites like StarLink are in earths shadow most of the night. Which means you can avoid unlimited satellites, you just need to wait longer to start and end well before dawn.

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I have seen StarLink satellites with my naked eye many times and confirmed with the Dark Sky app, past midnight as well.

For astronomy, aim up. The closer to the horizon the longer their visible before and after sunset. The sky rotates at night and at different times of the year so the overwhelming majority of things are still observable without any satellites.

Also, this is almost exclusively about about wide angel shots. You can still do ultra long exposure closeups of various things, at worse you might need to cover the shutter for a few seconds while a satellite moves into and out of the shot but even that’s generally avoidable.

But what if something I want to click is near the horizon? For example trying to get a shot of the sky with mountains in the frame. Avoiding the parts where the satellites are is not a viable solution most of the times.

Use Photoshop. Look I appreciate that astronomers, whether professional or hobbyists, may be inconvenienced by more satellites. But the odds that the public/governments will prioritize this over potentially much better rural broadband connectivity is approximately zero.

I agree it’s an going to show up in nighttime photography. You need better timing, manually remove them from photos, or take extra shots etc.

I am simply saying it’s not a major impediment for amateur Astronomy as you can time things to capture a clean picture of most objects as long as you time them so their above the horizon.

Also, if you want to aim for a mountain in long exposure all the stars are going to be smeared in the photo. If it’s short exposure their going to look like just another star.

Things rotating up is only true for stuff that is close to the Eastern or Western horizon. And yes different times of the year help a lot, but there is plenty of objects that are only visible a bit over the horizon at the best of times. Source: have help a radio astronomer with source visibility calculations.

Sure, and Polaris is never visible from Australia etc. But, it’s a much weaker argument to say these constellations limit observations by less than 10%.

The reality is there is real impact, but no where near as bad as many generally portrayed. Imagine some senator canceling funding for new ground based telescopes because they heard these satellites would render them useless.

I have heard astronomers estimating it at up to 30% of the observing time for existing optical telescopes. Note that this is the instrument class that has t to 20 times as many proposals as they can actually observe.

Yep, and others say it’s less than 1%. Neither of them are lying, but their talking about different kinds of observations.

My assumption is scheduling should solve most of these issues in terms of large instruments.

Professional astronomers observe during the daytime too, using radio or microwave. Mega-constellations impinge on their ability to do science, especially for techniques like VLBI, where there's no obvious way to remove satellites from the data.

That applies to all satellites not simply large arrays. Large constellations all on the same frequencies aren’t even close to 1:1 as bad as normal satellites.

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