4 ms·

Saw the ISS last night completely by chance from Schloss Sanssouci. Are the starlink satellites really visible to the naked eye?

• modeless 6y ago
  Sometimes! Conditions have to be just right. Specifically, only the most recently launched few can usually be seen as they travel to their final orbits over several weeks; the thousand plus operational ones generally can't be seen (which is good as there will be tens of thousands soon). And of course also they can only be seen if they happen to pass over in a time window about an hour after sunset or before sunrise, not the rest of the night. And these days SpaceX is deliberately rotating the satellites to reflect less light toward Earth, so sometimes they are still difficult to find.