4 ms·
I'm not sure which is worse, a shiny satellite that screams where it is (so you can avoid it) or a dark satellite that silently blocks a patch of the sky.
by kijin 7y ago
I'm not sure which is worse, a shiny satellite that screams where it is (so you can avoid it) or a dark satellite that silently blocks a patch of the sky.
- sigstoat 7y agothe shiny one. because telescopes aren't in the habit of avoiding shiny things; they use the databases of where all of this stuff is and do the math to figure out where it will be. the dark objects at least won't introduce extra photons into the optics to refract around, when they're in your field of view but not obstructing the thing you were actually trying to look at.
- Robotbeat 7y agoBy far the shiny satellite is worse. Besides, the satellites are tracked carefully by multiple parties, so any serious astronomical observation that could even theoretically be sensitive to a sub-millisecond obscuration of a ~microradian portion of the sky (such as certain exoplanet searches) would be well aware of this ahead of time (and atmospheric aberration would be a far greater effect). A dark satellite is effectively irrelevant to optical ground astronomy.