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The Night Sky Will Never Be the Same

theatlantic.com

11–13 of 13 posts

Re: The Night Sky Will Never Be the Same

#11
post #10

> "Obviously not everyone can pick up and relocate to the woods to experience the unobscured beauty of the sky. But there still are, for now, places where you’d expect not to see artificial stars passing overhead." Well the writer may expect it, but it hasn't really existed for a long time. If Starlink enables me to live somewhere like the western states or the great north woods and still work remotely and stay conne…

That's great for you. What about those who aren't willing to accept that tradeoff? It seems there's literally no action we can take besides voicing our concerns on fora like this. I'm deeply concerned about the ramifications of Starlink and the precedents it sets for further sky pollution. For all of mankind's history we've been able to look to the skies for guidance, inspiration, knowledge and truth. Space objects h…

This is an example of an externality. Externalities are historically extremely hard to address.

If you think of starlink sattelites being visible as a form of pollution, light pollution I suppose in this case, then it makes sense why the economics aren't priced in and there's little that can be done by a minority of this impacted.

Re: The Night Sky Will Never Be the Same

#12
post #5

The orbits are known and predictable, could they be fed into a sort of dynamic coronagraph that occludes the glares of the satellites while they move through the field of view of a telescope?

For serious astronomy this isn't viable, and for amateurs this really puts a dent in the magic and sanctity the night sky as we've known it throughout the entire history of our species. If only we could add "the night sky" to UNESCO's world heritage lists.

Re: The Night Sky Will Never Be the Same

#13
post #4
post #2

SpaceX is trialing a new absorbent coating on the new launches https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites-astronomy-p...

According to this at least one satellite with the new coating went up in December... anyone know how that's working out? Also, why are they so bright, given that they're pretty small?

Via Wikipedia: "The Moon has an exceptionally low albedo, giving it a reflectance that is slightly brighter than that of worn asphalt." Yet, the sun is /so bright/ that even at 380,000km we see moon-shadows at night on earth.

To a first approximation, small LEO satellites are roughly the same angular size as Venus at its average distance to us.

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