An image of the Australian desert illuminates satellite pollution

A startup idea: launch satellites to capture clean night sky photos, with tiered subscription model of course.

As someone who co-incidentally started dabbling in Astrophotography as a hobby in early 2019 before Starlink launched, back then you literally could capture a single 20-second exposure (on a very wide lens, so no obvious star trail/blur at that focal length due to the Earth's rotation), and get images with no satellites.

Now (and even in 2021 it was getting hard to do that) it's impossible to do that, even with 10 second exposures.

What's needed now is multiple exposures, and merging/integrating them in something like Siril (https://siril.org/) to remove the obvious satellite trails.

However, arguably, integrating multiple exposures, while annoying and time-consuming workflow-wise (i.e. can't just look at images directly from camera, and currently need to convert to TIFF first) is often the better way to get slightly-less-noisy images anyway, and integrate effectively longer exposures without star-trails, so it's a tricky one.

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>Unpopular opinion: global internet access is more important than pretty pictures of the sky.

You're right about one thing - It is an unpopular opinion. You're wrong about global internet access being more important than being able to take "pretty pictures" of the night sky.

Global internet access has become a tool for homogenizing opinion. It has become the most useful tool for propagandists and others who would push false narratives as facts in order to steer readers/listeners towards conclusions that are not based on facts. It has been subverted by well-funded groups with an agenda that does not serve the people out in the broad audience.

It could've been a critical part of bringing global societies up to speed on relevant issues that affect their lives and futures. Once the deep pockets with destructive agendas began funding tools to infect others with their world-views it became a weapon, not a tool.

Those of you who work in the industry should rebel against this subversion. I think many won't since the whole software industry appears to be trapped in a cycle of greedy grifts and subscriptions for worthless apps.

You know those airplanes with a banner at the beach?

I can imagine a constellation of satellites writing ads (live) in space using mirrors and other nifty tech.

Unless regulation stops it.