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The article covers the mitigations already in place and how they only partially resolve the issue. These satellites are low, bright (at dawn/dusk) and very soo

The article covers the mitigations already in place and how they only partially resolve the issue. These satellites are low, bright (at dawn/dusk) and very soon to be incredibly numerous. Yes, it is possible for data workflows to post-process these streaks away, but not all configurations allow this, and whereas previous intrusions were somewhat rare and could be ignored that simply won't be the case due to three companies from one country. This is cost turned into an "externality" and foisted upon astronomers--at every scale of investment--all over the world. Stock holders in these companies won't pay for it, but tax payers everywhere will pay for the mitigations. Not cool. This is a hill I'll die on.

q3k 6y ago
You won't be alone on that hill. This issue is yet another reminder that capitalism only appears to work because you assume infinite resources on a finite planet.
- kanox 6y ago
  This one of the stupider hills to die on. There are plenty of other factors interfering with astronomy and they can largely processed away. >This issue is yet another reminder that capitalism only appears to work because you assume infinite resources on a finite planet. This is complete bullshit, and a reminder that anti-capitalists are not worth arguing with.
- valuearb 6y ago
  Capitalism is terrible, it’s just far better than anything else we’ve ever tried. It’s only real Achilles heel is tragedy of the commons (like this), which is a problem for the isms as well.
dr_dshiv 6y ago
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?
- simion314 6y ago
  Will those american billionaires pay say for more European satellites to compensate? What if this were Chinese satellites would you have the same opinion? It would be great if this billionaires would also launch scientific satellites payed from their pocket to compensate, then I would change my mind.
  - gambiting 6y ago
    Exactly, if China launched thousands of satellites ruining everyone's astronomy efforts I'm sure there would be an uproar. But US doing it? Fine, business as usual.
    - tssva 6y ago
      The US isn't doing it. Companies are doing it. As stated in the article the company which is currently planning to place satellites at a height likely to have the greatest impact is OneWeb which is a UK company. It is soon to be controlled by the UK government and an Indian conglomerate. The satellites it launches are built by a joint venture which includes Airbus.
      - simion314 6y ago
        Have you read the paranoia about TikTok? I can see it "Trump: China puts 10000 eyes on the sky, they pretend they want to give Internet to the poor but they have cameras and spy on the traffic, and some reliable sources told me they can release viruses from this satellites in a targets back yard, this needs to stop , I will build a space wall and China will pay for it...
      - gambiting 6y ago
        >>The US isn't doing it. Companies are doing it. Well, that isn't really a useful distinction in any sense of the word. The American companies are doing it, because they are allowed to do so by their country. Most countries which have any kind of space capability have their own space agencies which say what is or isn't ok to launch. If the American space agencies approve things like Starlink, then the pollution of the Earth's view into space isn't purely on Elon Musk.
reitzensteinm 6y ago
I personally believe that pervasive high speed internet even in remote locations will do more for humanity than the scientific cost of these satellites. However, this conversation has basically been skipped over. Maybe you're right and I'm wrong. The constellations are being launched, and there's zero chance of shutting them down once they're serving a commercial role. Considering the abundant red tape in the modern world, it does seem like it was a little thin on the ground here.
- q3k 6y ago
  > I personally believe that pervasive high speed internet even in remote locations will do more for humanity than the scientific cost of these satellites. I've had faster Internet than the average Starlink speedtest says, in rural Romania, at the foot of a mountain, wild bears and all: https://twitter.com/q3k/status/1172621386977861632 https://twitter.com/q3k/status/1172621386977861632 . Internet access in rural areas is pretty much a solved problem, it just now hinges on enough of a societal push to apply this solution where needed. Starlink is yet another SV-style attempt to solve (US) societal problems by blindly applying technology. Except this time, this also affects other countries, and we're furious.
  - reitzensteinm 6y ago
    I've been there, it's beautiful. Although under ten kilometers from a town of tens of thousands wasn't exactly what I had in mind; I was picturing some of the places I've been in Africa that don't have mobile reception and may well never get it if it means laying fiber. A solar powered base station that relayed mobile internet, even if slow, would make a meaningful difference. The point of my comment isn't to defend the satellite launches, quite the opposite. It's saying that even as somebody that would be in favor, not carefully considering the trade offs before giving permission to permanently alter the night sky is not acceptable. This is exactly the kind of thing that bureaucracy should make painfully slow.
    - vanderZwan 6y ago
      > I was picturing some of the places I've been in Africa that don't have mobile reception and may well never get it if it means laying fiber. When was the last time that you were in Africa? And in which country, because it's an entire continent. EDIT: So I guess HN doesn't like being called out on https://africasacountry.com/ https://africasacountry.com/ issues? Well sorry not sorry, but as someone born in Ghana I'm more a little tired of the sentiment on display in the cited part of comment I'm reacting to, which is the implication that Africa as an entire continent is inherently and forever will be a place too poor to have proper infrastructure.
pfdietz 6y ago
Why do astronomers own the skies? I don't remember when they got title to that property.
- altacc 6y ago
  Conversely, why do the the satellite owners own the sky? Space is a shared resource. One use shouldn't infringe on another.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    Satellite owners don't own the skies, in the sense astronomers are trying to argue they do.
    - altacc 6y ago
      You're going to have to show me the quote that makes you think astronomers claim to "own" the skies instead of just not having their usage limited and infringed upon.
      - googlryas 6y ago
        Are other cars on the highway infringing upon my usage by making me sit in traffic?
- knolax 6y ago
  Astronomers don't "own" the skies, the rest of humanity simply considers the benefits of astronomy to be higher than some satellite internet vanity project.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    We can judge the value humanity places on astronomy by looking at how much money is allocated for it. I suspect it will come out less valuable, to humanity, than the service Starlink will provide.
growlist 6y ago
> This is a hill I'll die on. bit dramatic for a comment on the Internet
- smcl 6y ago
  This is a fairly common phrase in online discussions meaning "I will not budge on this position, and I am willing to take a lot of flak/abuse for it"
- foepys 6y ago
  It's an idiom. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hill_to_die_on https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hill_to_die_on
Luc 6y ago
As a shareholder I am in favour of investment in development of mitigation software. Better to take the initiative, before a government does.
51Cards 6y ago
As I noted on a similar thread the issue is not removing the streaks, it's what data is lost behind those. If you take a look at this image you'll see that it can be a non-trivial amount of interference in some cases and that data can't just be filled in with "black". https://i.imgur.com/Qdt0N2g.png https://i.imgur.com/Qdt0N2g.png The interference also causes a "glow" effect on the CCD which corrupts the data well beyond the edges of the main streak as well.
- ImaCake 6y ago
  I guess you could statistically impute that data. But it is the long tail of unlikely readings which are generally interesting, and imputation will not find those.
  - SiempreViernes 6y ago
    Imputing makes little sense when you are trying to _measure_ though.
  - weego 6y ago
    This is a logic flaw I see everywhere. Making a proposition for what might have been there is not a useful scientific instrument. And especially not when unseen anomalies are an integral part of pushing your field forward. If you're inferring what might have been there you're explicitly filling in based only on what you already know.
    - oasisbob 6y ago
      I agree, but isn't filing in what you already know a common technique when presenting things for human consumption? I'm thinking scanning microscopy, SEM, STM, etc. The image implies that all the data is from the same instant, when it's not. Normally that's OK, but it's not always.
      - Balgair 6y ago
        SEM fills in data?
0-_-0 6y ago
Is it a difficult problem to solve though in software? On its face it seems trivial, and something that should be part of an astronomer's job description. The cost of not having internet satellites seems to be many orders of magnitude higher than writing software to get around the problem.
- vanderZwan 6y ago
  First of all, as GP pointed out: whose cost? Second of all: I highly doubt that this is "trivial", given that observatories are built in the most remote areas of the planet because light pollution was already an enormous problem before these satellites appeared, despite the extra costs that adds to any such project.
  - 0-_-0 6y ago
    Light pollution is global, while a satellite streak is localised to a part of an image. These are not the same problem.
    - sreevisakh 6y ago
      It's the other way around. It's possible to escape light pollution by moving away from electrified areas, whereas satellite streak ruins observations in every part of the world. Besides, the streaks are not really localized in the image. Its glow reportedly extends up to 15 arc seconds. That's a very large area for a carefully exposed array.
      - 0-_-0 6y ago
        I meant light pollution affects the entire image, while a streak affects only part of it, which you can just remove. A 30 arcsec stripe on an (apparently average) 20 arcmin detector is 2.5% of the total area, so it's not a very large area. Overall, 20000 satellites at any given time cover 20kπ15acsec² of sky area, which is 0.0005% of total sky area, and over 1 second (assuming a satellite speed of 3.6 arcmin per second) it's 0.02424% of the sky, so roughly 1.45% of the surface area of a 1 minute exposure would have to be thrown out. This assumes that satellite streaks don't overlap, with overlap it would be less.
natch 6y ago
The first few are bright, but as you said only at dawn or dusk. The vast majority of future ones are intended to be dark, with partial mitigations (not perfect, nobody is making that claim) like dark coating applied by SpaceX at their own expense. With plentiful availability of orbital delivery, we can also expect more earth-orbiting space telescopes in our future, including private ones and with numbers possibly several orders of magnitude higher than what we have today. These will have higher orbits so that will help, and they will be largely immune to atmospheric effects. I would suggest the astronomy community ask SpaceX and others to commit to giving key projects free or low cost launch services or ride sharing to orbit, to help compensate for some of the costs you allude to. If asked directly, Elon is often responsive.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  > If asked directly, Elon is often responsive. Yeah, but the responses can be unpredictable :)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kanox 6y ago
>> The article covers the mitigations already in place and how they only partially resolve the issue. > So in April, SpaceX instead began launching Starlinks with a sunshade to block sunlight that would otherwise reflect off its antennas, which are the main source of the Starlinks’ brightness once they have reached their final positions. > So far, only one of these ‘VisorSat’ Starlinks has finished the journey to its final orbit of 550 kilometres above Earth. Amateur astronomers have reported that the sunshade appears to make the Starlink fainter than it would otherwise be. > But astronomers are still awaiting further confirmation that the modifications have a significant effect, says Meredith Rawls, an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle. Regardless, SpaceX is now launching all of its Starlinks with the sun-shielding visor. It seems that the impact of the sunshade mitigation is not yet fully measured?
mdorazio 6y ago
As a counterpoint, I'll die on the opposite hill with, I suspect, the large majority of the public. And I say that as someone who has been a lifelong space enthusiast. Ubiquitous access to cheap internet has done more for humanity in the last 20 years by far than any contribution from ground-based astronomy. If the choice is between Starlink and more difficult ground-based astronomy, I'll choose Starlink.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  Yeah, this is a tradeoff, and the balance seems to favor adding more satellites. We're not going to the stars for centuries at least. It's unlikely that further knowledge we're able to glean from ground-based installations will ever have practical value for anyone on any appreciable timescale. As cool as the stars are, they're really far away and damn hard to see, especially through the atmosphere.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    I think long term this isn't really a tradeoff. Starlink exists to fund SpaceX ventures designed to significantly drop the costs of lifting bulk mass to space. That translates to even cheaper missions, which means space-based astronomy can become affordable. What is a loss of some percentage of astronomical observations today, if it means putting a telescope on the backside of the Moon in 20 years, or a ridiculously large "virtual telescope" via a satellite constellation doing interferometry?
dheera 6y ago
I do a lot of astrophotography as a hobby and for visual/infrared images, these satellites are a non-issue and extremely easy to deal with by simple outlier rejection techinques. One of the most basic techniques is sigma clipping, in which you stack a bunch of sky-tracked images, and for each pixel, you throw away data points that are more than a sigma or two away from the mean before actually averaging. I already have to do this for aircraft, and aircraft do a LOT more photobombing than satellites. The satellite trail images people post all over the internet to fear monger the public are actually processed exactly the OPPOSITE way that astrophotographers would process an image stack. They are processed by taking the max at each pixel stack to emphasizing the outliers in the stack instead of eliminating the outliers and averaging the rest. No astronomer would ever do that. I can imagine they might be a bigger threat to radio astronomy, though.
- astrophysician 6y ago
  Not just radio astronomy but any other type of research astronomy. Astrophotography has different goals. If you want a good picture, this isn't a huge deal. If you're measuring pixel-level brightnesses using state of the art equipment, the story is completely different. The "fear mongering" you state is not fear mongering, it's an illustration of just how much of a research image is ruined by these tracks.
HumblyTossed 6y ago
> Yes, it is possible for data workflows to post-process these streaks away, but not all configurations allow this, and whereas previous intrusions were somewhat rare and could be ignored that simply won't be the case due to three companies from one country. Not to mention there will be far fewer non-processed photos. Most people won't care, but it just seems like nothing we see anymore is real.
- shajznnckfke 6y ago
  In between the thing and your perception of it, there are so many layers of bending, stretching, reflection, quantization, imputation, and filtering, occurring through different physical, digital, and biological processes. Why does this one make the image not real?
  - gorgoiler 6y ago
    Processes that are agnostic of the image and its artifacts feel different — “acceptable” — compared to ones that are specific to the image content itself. I am now imagining a science fiction story where visitors to Earth initiate communication with us using faint arcs of light across the night sky. No one notices and the telescopes and cameras filter them all out. The visitors go home, sulking.
oh_sigh 6y ago
This is a silly hill to die on. Did you complain(or would you have complained) when tax dollars were building space probes, meanwhile people are starving to death on earth? "Won't somebody please think of the astronomers!" is a moral panic that I just can't get behind. Astronomy is great. But world-spanning wireless internet is great too. If 5% of astronomical observations get messed up because 100% of people can now have access to the internet, then that is just a big shrug from me.
mmaunder 6y ago
I’m afraid you will die on that hill and be replaced by a happy rural resident who was being abused by a local telco monopoly, but is now using competitively priced, fast, low latency satellite internet. Using keps and scrubbing exposures in post is something we could already do decades ago. It’ll just be a new part of the workflow and eventually the space NIMBYs will quiet down.
- stickfigure 6y ago
  We have pitchforks and know how to use them. -- Rural Resident
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    That's not the extent of our arsenal.
- gorgoiler 6y ago
  Spaceships and radio waves are cool and provide a unique solution. Let’s not pretend this was the one true way to get around Comcast et al’s stranglehold though. That problem could have been solved politically with regulation plus (in the countryside) ground based radio, or (in cities) with regulation of cable infrastructure such that it was separated from packet-routing and customer-service. If satellite ISPs genuinely are the solution to entrenched telcos then every streak of light in the sky is a testament to the failure to find a solution. We will look back and wish we had been able to achieve a system of sensible business regulation delivered by those elected to do so.
  - ballooney 6y ago
    This should be the top comment. It’s an especially prevalent view in the USA that bad politics is a law of physics and the only solutions are madly technological. It’s not true as many other parts of the world prove. You can just have a not-insane ISP/telco regulatory system if you so choose. (see also healthcare, food/agricultural standards, water quality, online privacy... all choices).
elsonrodriguez 6y ago
The future of the night sky was always one filled with satellites and space ships and drive plumes. It's silly to die on a hill that's inevitable, it's much wiser to stand on the hill and reach higher. The future of space exploration is in space, not on the ground, and the proliferation of these satellites is a sign that space exploration is getting cheaper. Just like people were shocked that there was only one or two computers in the world at one point, they will be shocked that we only had Hubble for so long.
- beambot 6y ago
  Indeed! We're within reach of telescopes on the backside of the moon, or ultra-long baseline radio telescopes in high Earth Orbit. This is the dawn of a new era of space research. The transition may be unpleasant, but the future is exciting!
mrtnmcc 6y ago
I'm sure SpaceX would be happy to launch your ground-based telescope just above their constellation for a nominal fee.

q3k 6y ago

You won't be alone on that hill. This issue is yet another reminder that capitalism only appears to work because you assume infinite resources on a finite planet.

kanox 6y ago
This one of the stupider hills to die on. There are plenty of other factors interfering with astronomy and they can largely processed away. >This issue is yet another reminder that capitalism only appears to work because you assume infinite resources on a finite planet. This is complete bullshit, and a reminder that anti-capitalists are not worth arguing with.
valuearb 6y ago
Capitalism is terrible, it’s just far better than anything else we’ve ever tried. It’s only real Achilles heel is tragedy of the commons (like this), which is a problem for the isms as well.

dr_dshiv 6y ago

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?

simion314 6y ago
Will those american billionaires pay say for more European satellites to compensate? What if this were Chinese satellites would you have the same opinion? It would be great if this billionaires would also launch scientific satellites payed from their pocket to compensate, then I would change my mind.
- gambiting 6y ago
  Exactly, if China launched thousands of satellites ruining everyone's astronomy efforts I'm sure there would be an uproar. But US doing it? Fine, business as usual.
  - tssva 6y ago
    The US isn't doing it. Companies are doing it. As stated in the article the company which is currently planning to place satellites at a height likely to have the greatest impact is OneWeb which is a UK company. It is soon to be controlled by the UK government and an Indian conglomerate. The satellites it launches are built by a joint venture which includes Airbus.
    - simion314 6y ago
      Have you read the paranoia about TikTok? I can see it "Trump: China puts 10000 eyes on the sky, they pretend they want to give Internet to the poor but they have cameras and spy on the traffic, and some reliable sources told me they can release viruses from this satellites in a targets back yard, this needs to stop , I will build a space wall and China will pay for it...
    - gambiting 6y ago
      >>The US isn't doing it. Companies are doing it. Well, that isn't really a useful distinction in any sense of the word. The American companies are doing it, because they are allowed to do so by their country. Most countries which have any kind of space capability have their own space agencies which say what is or isn't ok to launch. If the American space agencies approve things like Starlink, then the pollution of the Earth's view into space isn't purely on Elon Musk.

reitzensteinm 6y ago

I personally believe that pervasive high speed internet even in remote locations will do more for humanity than the scientific cost of these satellites. However, this conversation has basically been skipped over. Maybe you're right and I'm wrong. The constellations are being launched, and there's zero chance of shutting them down once they're serving a commercial role. Considering the abundant red tape in the modern world, it does seem like it was a little thin on the ground here.

q3k 6y ago
> I personally believe that pervasive high speed internet even in remote locations will do more for humanity than the scientific cost of these satellites. I've had faster Internet than the average Starlink speedtest says, in rural Romania, at the foot of a mountain, wild bears and all: https://twitter.com/q3k/status/1172621386977861632 https://twitter.com/q3k/status/1172621386977861632 . Internet access in rural areas is pretty much a solved problem, it just now hinges on enough of a societal push to apply this solution where needed. Starlink is yet another SV-style attempt to solve (US) societal problems by blindly applying technology. Except this time, this also affects other countries, and we're furious.
- reitzensteinm 6y ago
  I've been there, it's beautiful. Although under ten kilometers from a town of tens of thousands wasn't exactly what I had in mind; I was picturing some of the places I've been in Africa that don't have mobile reception and may well never get it if it means laying fiber. A solar powered base station that relayed mobile internet, even if slow, would make a meaningful difference. The point of my comment isn't to defend the satellite launches, quite the opposite. It's saying that even as somebody that would be in favor, not carefully considering the trade offs before giving permission to permanently alter the night sky is not acceptable. This is exactly the kind of thing that bureaucracy should make painfully slow.
  - vanderZwan 6y ago
    > I was picturing some of the places I've been in Africa that don't have mobile reception and may well never get it if it means laying fiber. When was the last time that you were in Africa? And in which country, because it's an entire continent. EDIT: So I guess HN doesn't like being called out on https://africasacountry.com/ https://africasacountry.com/ issues? Well sorry not sorry, but as someone born in Ghana I'm more a little tired of the sentiment on display in the cited part of comment I'm reacting to, which is the implication that Africa as an entire continent is inherently and forever will be a place too poor to have proper infrastructure.

pfdietz 6y ago

Why do astronomers own the skies? I don't remember when they got title to that property.

altacc 6y ago
Conversely, why do the the satellite owners own the sky? Space is a shared resource. One use shouldn't infringe on another.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  Satellite owners don't own the skies, in the sense astronomers are trying to argue they do.
  - altacc 6y ago
    You're going to have to show me the quote that makes you think astronomers claim to "own" the skies instead of just not having their usage limited and infringed upon.
    - googlryas 6y ago
      Are other cars on the highway infringing upon my usage by making me sit in traffic?
knolax 6y ago
Astronomers don't "own" the skies, the rest of humanity simply considers the benefits of astronomy to be higher than some satellite internet vanity project.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  We can judge the value humanity places on astronomy by looking at how much money is allocated for it. I suspect it will come out less valuable, to humanity, than the service Starlink will provide.

growlist 6y ago

> This is a hill I'll die on. bit dramatic for a comment on the Internet

smcl 6y ago
This is a fairly common phrase in online discussions meaning "I will not budge on this position, and I am willing to take a lot of flak/abuse for it"
foepys 6y ago
It's an idiom. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hill_to_die_on https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hill_to_die_on

Luc 6y ago

As a shareholder I am in favour of investment in development of mitigation software. Better to take the initiative, before a government does.

51Cards 6y ago

As I noted on a similar thread the issue is not removing the streaks, it's what data is lost behind those. If you take a look at this image you'll see that it can be a non-trivial amount of interference in some cases and that data can't just be filled in with "black". https://i.imgur.com/Qdt0N2g.png https://i.imgur.com/Qdt0N2g.png The interference also causes a "glow" effect on the CCD which corrupts the data well beyond the edges of the main streak as well.

ImaCake 6y ago
I guess you could statistically impute that data. But it is the long tail of unlikely readings which are generally interesting, and imputation will not find those.
- SiempreViernes 6y ago
  Imputing makes little sense when you are trying to _measure_ though.
- weego 6y ago
  This is a logic flaw I see everywhere. Making a proposition for what might have been there is not a useful scientific instrument. And especially not when unseen anomalies are an integral part of pushing your field forward. If you're inferring what might have been there you're explicitly filling in based only on what you already know.
  - oasisbob 6y ago
    I agree, but isn't filing in what you already know a common technique when presenting things for human consumption? I'm thinking scanning microscopy, SEM, STM, etc. The image implies that all the data is from the same instant, when it's not. Normally that's OK, but it's not always.
    - Balgair 6y ago
      SEM fills in data?

0-_-0 6y ago

Is it a difficult problem to solve though in software? On its face it seems trivial, and something that should be part of an astronomer's job description. The cost of not having internet satellites seems to be many orders of magnitude higher than writing software to get around the problem.

vanderZwan 6y ago
First of all, as GP pointed out: whose cost? Second of all: I highly doubt that this is "trivial", given that observatories are built in the most remote areas of the planet because light pollution was already an enormous problem before these satellites appeared, despite the extra costs that adds to any such project.
- 0-_-0 6y ago
  Light pollution is global, while a satellite streak is localised to a part of an image. These are not the same problem.
  - sreevisakh 6y ago
    It's the other way around. It's possible to escape light pollution by moving away from electrified areas, whereas satellite streak ruins observations in every part of the world. Besides, the streaks are not really localized in the image. Its glow reportedly extends up to 15 arc seconds. That's a very large area for a carefully exposed array.
    - 0-_-0 6y ago
      I meant light pollution affects the entire image, while a streak affects only part of it, which you can just remove. A 30 arcsec stripe on an (apparently average) 20 arcmin detector is 2.5% of the total area, so it's not a very large area. Overall, 20000 satellites at any given time cover 20kπ15acsec² of sky area, which is 0.0005% of total sky area, and over 1 second (assuming a satellite speed of 3.6 arcmin per second) it's 0.02424% of the sky, so roughly 1.45% of the surface area of a 1 minute exposure would have to be thrown out. This assumes that satellite streaks don't overlap, with overlap it would be less.

natch 6y ago

The first few are bright, but as you said only at dawn or dusk. The vast majority of future ones are intended to be dark, with partial mitigations (not perfect, nobody is making that claim) like dark coating applied by SpaceX at their own expense. With plentiful availability of orbital delivery, we can also expect more earth-orbiting space telescopes in our future, including private ones and with numbers possibly several orders of magnitude higher than what we have today. These will have higher orbits so that will help, and they will be largely immune to atmospheric effects. I would suggest the astronomy community ask SpaceX and others to commit to giving key projects free or low cost launch services or ride sharing to orbit, to help compensate for some of the costs you allude to. If asked directly, Elon is often responsive.

BurningFrog 6y ago
> If asked directly, Elon is often responsive. Yeah, but the responses can be unpredictable :)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

kanox 6y ago

>> The article covers the mitigations already in place and how they only partially resolve the issue. > So in April, SpaceX instead began launching Starlinks with a sunshade to block sunlight that would otherwise reflect off its antennas, which are the main source of the Starlinks’ brightness once they have reached their final positions. > So far, only one of these ‘VisorSat’ Starlinks has finished the journey to its final orbit of 550 kilometres above Earth. Amateur astronomers have reported that the sunshade appears to make the Starlink fainter than it would otherwise be. > But astronomers are still awaiting further confirmation that the modifications have a significant effect, says Meredith Rawls, an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle. Regardless, SpaceX is now launching all of its Starlinks with the sun-shielding visor. It seems that the impact of the sunshade mitigation is not yet fully measured?

mdorazio 6y ago

As a counterpoint, I'll die on the opposite hill with, I suspect, the large majority of the public. And I say that as someone who has been a lifelong space enthusiast. Ubiquitous access to cheap internet has done more for humanity in the last 20 years by far than any contribution from ground-based astronomy. If the choice is between Starlink and more difficult ground-based astronomy, I'll choose Starlink.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
Yeah, this is a tradeoff, and the balance seems to favor adding more satellites. We're not going to the stars for centuries at least. It's unlikely that further knowledge we're able to glean from ground-based installations will ever have practical value for anyone on any appreciable timescale. As cool as the stars are, they're really far away and damn hard to see, especially through the atmosphere.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  I think long term this isn't really a tradeoff. Starlink exists to fund SpaceX ventures designed to significantly drop the costs of lifting bulk mass to space. That translates to even cheaper missions, which means space-based astronomy can become affordable. What is a loss of some percentage of astronomical observations today, if it means putting a telescope on the backside of the Moon in 20 years, or a ridiculously large "virtual telescope" via a satellite constellation doing interferometry?

dheera 6y ago

I do a lot of astrophotography as a hobby and for visual/infrared images, these satellites are a non-issue and extremely easy to deal with by simple outlier rejection techinques. One of the most basic techniques is sigma clipping, in which you stack a bunch of sky-tracked images, and for each pixel, you throw away data points that are more than a sigma or two away from the mean before actually averaging. I already have to do this for aircraft, and aircraft do a LOT more photobombing than satellites. The satellite trail images people post all over the internet to fear monger the public are actually processed exactly the OPPOSITE way that astrophotographers would process an image stack. They are processed by taking the max at each pixel stack to emphasizing the outliers in the stack instead of eliminating the outliers and averaging the rest. No astronomer would ever do that. I can imagine they might be a bigger threat to radio astronomy, though.

astrophysician 6y ago
Not just radio astronomy but any other type of research astronomy. Astrophotography has different goals. If you want a good picture, this isn't a huge deal. If you're measuring pixel-level brightnesses using state of the art equipment, the story is completely different. The "fear mongering" you state is not fear mongering, it's an illustration of just how much of a research image is ruined by these tracks.

HumblyTossed 6y ago

> Yes, it is possible for data workflows to post-process these streaks away, but not all configurations allow this, and whereas previous intrusions were somewhat rare and could be ignored that simply won't be the case due to three companies from one country. Not to mention there will be far fewer non-processed photos. Most people won't care, but it just seems like nothing we see anymore is real.

shajznnckfke 6y ago
In between the thing and your perception of it, there are so many layers of bending, stretching, reflection, quantization, imputation, and filtering, occurring through different physical, digital, and biological processes. Why does this one make the image not real?
- gorgoiler 6y ago
  Processes that are agnostic of the image and its artifacts feel different — “acceptable” — compared to ones that are specific to the image content itself. I am now imagining a science fiction story where visitors to Earth initiate communication with us using faint arcs of light across the night sky. No one notices and the telescopes and cameras filter them all out. The visitors go home, sulking.

oh_sigh 6y ago

This is a silly hill to die on. Did you complain(or would you have complained) when tax dollars were building space probes, meanwhile people are starving to death on earth? "Won't somebody please think of the astronomers!" is a moral panic that I just can't get behind. Astronomy is great. But world-spanning wireless internet is great too. If 5% of astronomical observations get messed up because 100% of people can now have access to the internet, then that is just a big shrug from me.

mmaunder 6y ago

I’m afraid you will die on that hill and be replaced by a happy rural resident who was being abused by a local telco monopoly, but is now using competitively priced, fast, low latency satellite internet. Using keps and scrubbing exposures in post is something we could already do decades ago. It’ll just be a new part of the workflow and eventually the space NIMBYs will quiet down.

stickfigure 6y ago
We have pitchforks and know how to use them. -- Rural Resident
- jessaustin 6y ago
  That's not the extent of our arsenal.
gorgoiler 6y ago
Spaceships and radio waves are cool and provide a unique solution. Let’s not pretend this was the one true way to get around Comcast et al’s stranglehold though. That problem could have been solved politically with regulation plus (in the countryside) ground based radio, or (in cities) with regulation of cable infrastructure such that it was separated from packet-routing and customer-service. If satellite ISPs genuinely are the solution to entrenched telcos then every streak of light in the sky is a testament to the failure to find a solution. We will look back and wish we had been able to achieve a system of sensible business regulation delivered by those elected to do so.
- ballooney 6y ago
  This should be the top comment. It’s an especially prevalent view in the USA that bad politics is a law of physics and the only solutions are madly technological. It’s not true as many other parts of the world prove. You can just have a not-insane ISP/telco regulatory system if you so choose. (see also healthcare, food/agricultural standards, water quality, online privacy... all choices).

elsonrodriguez 6y ago

The future of the night sky was always one filled with satellites and space ships and drive plumes. It's silly to die on a hill that's inevitable, it's much wiser to stand on the hill and reach higher. The future of space exploration is in space, not on the ground, and the proliferation of these satellites is a sign that space exploration is getting cheaper. Just like people were shocked that there was only one or two computers in the world at one point, they will be shocked that we only had Hubble for so long.

beambot 6y ago
Indeed! We're within reach of telescopes on the backside of the moon, or ultra-long baseline radio telescopes in high Earth Orbit. This is the dawn of a new era of space research. The transition may be unpleasant, but the future is exciting!

mrtnmcc 6y ago

I'm sure SpaceX would be happy to launch your ground-based telescope just above their constellation for a nominal fee.