Now we have a new observation bias: due to geometry and the orbits companies choose, certain times of night and certain times of year will have more satellite streaks than others. Now we have to try to account for that bias too, while private companies try to keep all their satellite properties secret.
Relatedly: here's a beautiful animation of a bunch of images of comet 12P (not taken by me, credit to astrophotographer Michael Jaeger). I was rather stunned that they didn't point out in the caption how freaking many satellites fly through during the ~1 hour set of images. Does this not bother photographers?
@sundogplanets sometimes I wish Arthur C Clarke were still alive to tell these LEO satellite bozos where to get off, cos I figure there's an actual remote chance they'd have listened to him.
Are they just accepting that they have to deal with communication satellite streaks being included in their images? That they have to work around it? (As one person bluntly told me it was simple to do!)
@grb090423 I think it's relatively simple if you are "just" going for a pretty picture. I know it's a much, much harder if you're trying to remove the streak and preserve scientific information in the image
@TeeCeeGee@jetton They tried painting one black, it overheated and died. They put sunshades on them for a while, which really helped, but then they stopped doing that. Now they have some kind of different surface they won't tell astronomers anything about, and it does seem to help, but they also made the satellites much bigger, so overall, no signficant change. I give them credit for trying a few things, but I have no doubt they could do more if it was a priority.
@sundogplanets That makes me a little sad. I was looking forward to all the excitement surrounding a discovery of another planet in our solar system.
Observational biases strike again, I guess.
Nonetheless, plenty of other discoveries besides P9 to make once the Vera Rubin Observatory comes online.
If you want to know more about this topic in a podcast format, have a listen to a conversation @sundogplanets was kind enough to have with me a while back...
Thank you Prof. Lawler for your tireless work to put the horrendous issues associated with Starlink in front of the public. While we are on the subject we should also discuss the Kessler Syndrome.
Some evening not too long from now you may look up, and instead of the stars and the ubiquitous Starlink satellite trains marching along, you might see a night sky filled with brilliant sparkles. What's happened?
Well in their infinite stupidity the US government has granted Elon Musk's SpaceX permission to launch thousands of Starlink satellites into low earth orbit (LEO). These things are wizzing around up there trying to avoid crashing into one another, and with each new batch that becomes harder. Plus now the Chinese and Amazon are sending up their own satellite constellations. It's a massive traffic problem.
Kind of like airline traffic, only infinitely worse. If planes collide, the wreckage just falls to the ground. In space, one triggering event, either an accident or some intentional anti-satellite action and, like a room full of mousetraps and ping-pong balls, you get a cascading series of collisions which can take out everything leaving an unnavigable debris field for decades. And humanity is screwed. That's what we are playing with here.
From its inception, Nazis played an important role in the development of America's space program. Oligarch Musk is the direct descendant of Wernher Von Braun. Of course, Von Braun actually knew what he was doing, whereas Musk builds exploding rocket ships.
If this thread has sparked your interest in the subject of Starlink space pollution. Here is a great article derived from an interview with Prof. Lawler:
@sundogplanets I skimmed the replies but didn't see--which satellite is this? Bluewalker (which seems like what you'd design as a satellite to actively but deniably destroy ground astronomy) or would that be even worse D:
@sundogplanets Hey, I’m a software dude [sorry] but I just wanted to say some of us care, keep up the good work and I hope one day we see the need for clear skies for astronomy as we do the need for other wild spaces
@shalien I haven't traced back this one particular streak. But odds are it's a Starlink, they're 60% of all satellites now, and an even higher fraction of LEO satellites.
@sundogplanets Ok so I’m a software dude but I don’t think this is mansplaining :) Do you know roughly how many terrestrial telescopes could be replaced with orbiting equivalents and what the tradeoffs would be between the two types? It would be rad to tax the jerks causing this and use the revenue to launch a bunch of open access telescope satellites, but I’m ignorant and this could be a bad idea for many reasons.
@cowboyscott 1) orbiting telescopes cost at least 10x as much, cost hundreds of times more to fix (if it is even possible to fix them), and you're stuck with tech that's at least 10 years old by the time you launch.
@sundogplanets@cowboyscott that's interesting that it's still 10x the cost. That's the figure I was told at university (late 90s) by one of the people who worked on one of Hubble's instruments. We've had this whole launch industry swell up since then.
@sundogplanets@cowboyscott
I have an irrational worry about relying only on orbiting telescopes. Even though we're not visually looking through ground-based telescopes either, I find it reassuring that one could take them apart and really check them if they show something unexpected.
And space telescopes are run by only a few space agencies, there's more diversity on the ground.
And having big building on the ground is good for public support, people need more than computer animations.
@StephanMatthiesen@cowboyscott agree, and we absolutely cannot "just move every observatory into space." That is a ridiculous suggestion for so many reasons...
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