81–90 of 395 posts
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Conversely, why do the the satellite owners own the sky? Space is a shared resource. One use shouldn't infringe on another.
Satellite owners don't own the skies, in the sense astronomers are trying to argue they do.
There is so much unwarranted alarmism about this. This is not the end of astronomy, nor is it even super serious. The "unavoidable impact" they're talking about is that astronomers will have to care about when and where satellites will appear, rather than not bothering and just throwing away the rare image with a satellite in it. A small percentage of their pixels will be affected by satellite trails and they will ne…
> will cost you some effort and money and time. This externality needs to be captured for it to be fair.
Considering the end result, 'Dyson Sphere' would have been a more interesting name choice than Starlink.
The whole astronomy problem could be solved if FCC had teeth and forced us to get the fiber connections we already paid for
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Isn't the solution more satellites for astronomy? In fact, couldn't the constellation of commercial satellites be used to make a massive distributed hubble telescope?
For many reasons, ground-based telescopes will continue to play a major role in astronomy. Space telescopes offer advantages for particular types of observations, but there are many types of observations for which ground-based telescopes are superior. The basic advantages that ground-based telescopes have are: * Larger collecting area, which means more photons collected, which means you can see fainter objects. * Wit…
Optical aperture synthesis with electronically connected telescopes https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7852
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How do you know what the final orbits are? Why would they not be visible on the final orbits? Sure, only a fraction of the satellites will be above you and illuminated by the sun, but at 30000 that's still bound to be a huge number. See for example this guy who tried to model this for the lower number of 12000: https://twitter.com/Alex_Parker/status/1132335640605945856
The final orbits are approved in advance by the government; there's no mystery. They are not visible to the naked eye in their final orbits because they are farther away and they maintain an orientation that allows their sunshade to reflect sunlight away from Earth instead of toward it.
"However, at low elevations near twilight at intermediate latitudes (45°–55°, e.g., much of Europe) hundreds of satellites may be visible at once to naked-eye observers at dark sites."
This is referring to Starlink's 12000 satellite constellation, so thousands absolutely is the order of magnitude we're talking about when (if) they go to the planned 30000 and when other companies do the same.
[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab8016
Could a country (or a continent) in theory remove satellites hanging above their area? What if countries decide to extend the airspace to the aerospace?
However it is supposed to work and however it does work at sea, is the situation similar for space?
> What if countries decide to extend the airspace to the aerospace?
I imagine the US would consider it an attack and retaliate (maybe economically, militarily, or covertly) against the "attacking" country.
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Dude, the astronomers don't pay , the public pays. So the people in all the world will have to pay more billions to american companies to workaround the mess those created. This sounds very mafia like - or Cyber Punk where you can't see the sky or the sun anymore unless you are a billionaire. Someone had a great idea, we tax all bright objects put in orbit, then there is an intensive to make the satellites less brigh…
>>Someone had a great idea, we tax all bright objects put in orbit Well, couple small problems with this idea 1) who collects the taxes? I can imagine some international agency in charge of it which then proceeds to spend the money on other international projects, but how could you guarantee compliance? 2) Countries which are only now starting to launch things into orbit would(rightfully) say - hey, how is that fair?…
2) this always happens, look at intellectual rights. The country with the bigger army forces the rest to play by their rules.
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If you take long exposure of dim object, bright satellite passing in front of it will saturate signal and there will be nothing to recover. To avoid that you need to track all the satellites and split one long exposure into multiple shorter ones - but that multiplies read noise accordingly.
This is why I take 500+ images and process them. I don't think the moving satellites would cause any harm to long exposure deep space photography. I agree if you take 30 pictures, it could be a problem.
If you do 500 exposures you get 500x read noise of the sensor mixed with signal. Modern CCD and CMOS sensor have low read noise (compared to thermal and shot noise) but not zero.
For scientific observations of faint objects long exposure times on order of hours are necessary, for amateur astrophotography you can just go with multiple exposures.
What I'm concerned about is how much the launching of tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of satellites will affect our ability to launch things out of orbit. Launch windows are already very precisely calculated, and the more junk we put in orbit the harder that will become.