5 ms·

“Just avoid the satellites” they said

64 points by brundolf 5y ago

invisible 5y ago
On the face of it, a composite image of space that has no adjustments being ruined by 2x the number of satellites does seem pretty bad and damaging for researchers. Beyond that, it still might be worth it to actually be able to provide internet to people that either don't have access, have an insane cost to access, and/or have a bad provider currently. The argument I've seen is that this stuff can be adjusted for and that most researchers have already had to adjust for it (since there are ~1500 non-Starlink satellites already). Is that just an utter fallacy?
- mh- 5y ago
  (Disclaimer: I know ~nothing about astronomy) The other claim I've seen is that once the satellites reach their operational orbit (~4 months after launch), they are no longer visible. I don't know if this has been proven/disproven yet. Curious if anyone in-the-know can comment.
  - ortusdux 5y ago
    They are no longer visible to the naked eye. The satellites are initially inserted at ~half their final orbit. They then boot up, deploy their solar panels horizontally to reduce drag, and then fire up their engines for the boost to their final orbit. This takes about a month or so. Once there, they rotate their panels to point away from the earth, which greatly reduces their apparent brightness.
  - mlindner 5y ago
    You're correct that they are no longer visible to the naked eye. They're reduced down to (right now) approximately 6th magnitude and SpaceX is trying to get them down to 7th magnitude. The human eye in a perfectly or almost perfectly dark sky can see down to roughly (humans vary quite a bit) 6th magnitude but it would be very hard, especially for a moving object. In order to see 6th magnitude you need a very dark sky (no moon or clouds, low humidity, no human populations anywhere nearby), you would need to dark adapt for over 30 minutes with no viewing of any sources of light, you'd need to be pretty young, and then you'd need to use averted-vision viewing where you look near an object, but not directly at it such that you can use the higher density of rods in the rest of your eye in order to see the object. You'd then have a chance of seeing current Starlink satellites, but you'd see a ton of other satellites as well as there's many satellites above 6th magnitude. (In 2017 or so I was in rural Nebraska the night before the solar eclipse and it felt like there was a half dozen visible satellites in the sky at any given time.) However that doesn't mean they're not visible to telescopes.
- adrian_b 5y ago
  Image processing is not magic. Obviously you can remove the satellite traces from the image, but each of them causes a degradation in quality, i.e. a reduction in the signal-to-noise ratio, because the light coming from the sky zones obscured by the satellites has not been captured by the sensors. Regardless how well you might process the sky images, the large increase in the number of satellites will reduce their quality.
  - invisible 5y ago
    It makes sense that each frame would suffer from signal-to-noise problems and be degraded, but given that this image was created over 2 hours -- is there really any loss in quality if sampled correctly? I could honestly believe there are a bunch of complexities beyond this, but: is this already having to be done _anyway_?
  - mlindner 5y ago
    > Regardless how well you might process the sky images, the large increase in the number of satellites will reduce their quality. Right, this is the true statement of the issue. However is a _marginal_ loss in image data quality really not that bad a thing to ask for for getting internet across the planet effectively (in human history terms) overnight?
- invisible 5y ago
  I turned up the person who actually made the image, and their choice for how they made this image makes me confused: https://twitter.com/GrumpyOldAstro/status/1396370610368831490?s=20 https://twitter.com/GrumpyOldAstro/status/139637061036883149... Essentially, they chose to multiply any light from all of the frames.
slg 5y ago
Musk is an easy scapegoat and blaming him personally removes the complexity of an issue that has real pros and cons on both sides.
- TremendousJudge 5y ago
  You don't get to advertise all the projects by companies you own as "Elon Musk's X" while also avoiding to take blame for their failure
  - mlindner 5y ago
    Invariably when negative news is about Tesla or SpaceX, "Elon Musk's X" is in the title. When the reverse is true I see it much less often. In either case adding "Elon Musk's X" into the title is clickbait and should not be done, for positive or negative news.
  - slg 5y ago
    >avoiding to take blame for their failure It is way too early to call this a "failure" and the problem here is not Musk himself doing this but the governmental regulation that allows it. If Musk wasn't putting up these satellites, someone else would. Maybe not today, but eventually. As a society we need to do a better job blaming the systems that allow something to happen rather than the individuals who exist in and use that system.
    - Daho0n 5y ago
      If Russia did this they would risk making the cold war less cold if it allowed Americans access. The problem here is that the US will not do anything to stop this even if the rest of earth didn't like the idea. We need to have modern laws instead of the mess we have now before something bad happens.
- cyberlurker 5y ago
  If he (scapegoat or not) popularizes the debate over orbital debris now before it becomes a bigger problem, great.
pwinnski 5y ago
This, combined with the really mediocre service available from Starlink[0], combined with the plan to put up many thousands more satellites, is truly disheartening. 0. https://www.theverge.com/22435030/starlink-satellite-internet-spacex-review https://www.theverge.com/22435030/starlink-satellite-interne...
- 1023bytes 5y ago
  Mediocre maybe compared to fiber
- cyberlurker 5y ago
  Yea, I wish we’d go back to the “Google fiber” days of a disruptive tech company laying cable and fiber optics everywhere. And before someone says it, Yes yes, Google bad, but I liked the initiative.
  - pwinnski 5y ago
    Google was making it work before incumbent companies sued and blocked them[0]. The problem with broadband in the US is not technical, and it's not solely distances or the nature of rural spaces. It's political and economic. We managed to deliver electricity and then telephone to everyone with a push from the federal government, we could do it again. But now AT&T, Comcast and Time-Warner are too powerful, so we end up with ground-based telescopes suffering instead. 0. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160314/09374733901/isps-are-blocking-google-fibers-access-to-utility-poles-california.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160314/09374733901/isps-...
    - mlindner 5y ago
      > so we end up without a night sky. Please don't use hyperbole like this as some people believe it and it confuses the conversation. Starlink will not erase the night sky. Starlink in operational orbits is not human eye visible. This is only a concern for ground based telescopes, not the average person viewing the night sky.
ralph84 5y ago
> As a researcher, to those who backed Musk and the like on this bullshit vanity project; Fuck you, he's stealing the fucking sky from us Why does the sky only belong to researchers and not all of humanity? The number of humans interested in faster internet far exceeds the number of humans interested in earth-based telescopes.
- noodlesUK 5y ago
  I’m not a researcher, and when I look at that photo, I feel like the sky is being stolen. It’s that it’s for one man’s company, not for all humanity. The lack of internet coverage in the US is a solvable problem driven by idiotic politics, and land based solutions will always be lower latency/faster if built right.
  - ironmagma 5y ago
    Playing devil's advocate, if a problem is solvable but politics prevent it from being solved, the problem is not solvable.
    - noodlesUK 5y ago
      You’re totally right to an extent. It means that any solution to that problem is political of course, rather than technical. This is an interesting example where a company’s business model is effectively a technical workaround to a political problem
  - _Microft 5y ago
    > not for all humanity Starlink does theoretically solve the problem of internet access for everyone, everywhere. At once.
    - noodlesUK 5y ago
      For all those who can afford it, subject to the whims of a company controlled by one man. The sky is beautiful and free for anyone who can look up towards it.
sxates 5y ago
It sucks to lose something you always had and took for granted. I wonder what the reverse situation would look like - if everyone on the planet had easy access to high speed satellite internet, and astronomers came along and insisted we had to pull the whole thing down so we could study stars. Would that be an equal or un-equal tragedy?
- adrian_b 5y ago
  The comparison is really meaningless, because for looking towards the surrounding space there is no other way, while for Internet access there are many alternatives both cheaper and faster than a network of satellites. Many years ago I have worked as a designer of equipment for long-distance wireless communication links for Internet access. I have no doubt that it would be possible to cover all the remote areas of USA with a network of towers with directional antennas for the links between themselves at a lower cost and with better performance than SpaceX's constellation of satellites. The reason why this has not been done is not technical. The fact that the communication services offered by SpaceX are more advantageous than the alternatives available in USA is a historical accident, not something caused by objective reality. The difference between the solution implemented by SpaceX and a ground-based solution is that to be able to provide their services SpaceX occupies resources that they do not own. The sky does not belong to SpaceX, I and billions of other humans who will never use the services of SpaceX have as much rights to the sky as the SpaceX customers, so SpaceX is stealing from us to serve their customers. This is the same like someone who chooses to smoke in a public place besides me. I do not care if he smokes at his home, that is his right, but if he smokes besides me and forces me to inhale his smoke, I consider that an aggression. In the same way, occupying the sky with satellites is a nuisance and an aggression towards all those who are not SpaceX customers and who have not agreed that SpaceX may use in this way something that belongs to all humans, not to an US company or to an US agency.
  - mlindner 5y ago
    > because for looking towards the surrounding space there is no other way This doesn't prevent them from looking outwards towards the surrounding space. It just makes the data a bit more noisy once processing is completed. It doesn't completely obscure anything (unless that thing was incredibly faint and near the noise floor anyway). > while for Internet access there are many alternatives both cheaper and faster than a network of satellites. If there were "many alternatives both cheaper and faster", people would not be going literally crazy over waiting for the service to become available at their premises. You can see such people moping and complaining on threads everywhere while they wait for service to become available. For the market where Starlink is wanted there are often no options that are faster and in some cases not even any options that are cheaper. I've heard several anecdotes of people who were paying $200+ a month for around 1 mbps for internet service before they got Starlink.
chomp 5y ago
What's the point of this profane tweet? Starlink is rural people's best hope of finally not being an afterthought, not just in America, but around the world. And this problem can be trivially solved with stacking. There's nothing of substance here, just more internet vitriol.
- 8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y ago
  No, you're embedding a bunch of viewpoints in this comment as facts when there is absolutely room for disagreement. For example I think "rural people's best hope of finally not being an afterthought" is massive government infrastructure projects that don't factor in profitability. Note that I am not trying to _have_ this discussion here, just pointing out that it's a valid disagreement. And the author of that tweet it seems considers this a loss of an ancient and fundamental shared planetary resource. I think anger is an understandable, even appropriate reaction to that perception! The point is to get people to talk about it and maybe also not just accept the neoliberal consensus about the role of technology and infrastructure and their externalities. Seems to have succeeded by that measure. There is plenty of substance here but you're using the author's anger and profanity as an excuse to not engage with it.
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    How is a massive government infrastructure program that doesn't exist an alternative to a satellite system that does exist? If I'm out in a rural location I can either use satellites for internet or the non-existent government program? It's also clearly not a loss of an ancient planetary resource. The satellites can't be seen with the naked eye so the vast majority won't notice. Astral photographers and astronomers may have to do slightly more post-processing on certain types of images, but that hardly seems like a big deal.
- happytoexplain 5y ago
  I can sympathize with the extreme emotions on display here. Some things are worth shouting about. Some things are worth saying "fuck you" about. Some things are that important. That said, yes, we should focus on the big picture in places like HN. That doesn't mean we ignore or disparage the mere mortals who care so much about the sky.
visviva 5y ago
Not to minimize the impact that large constellations *could* have on ground-based astronomy, but without more context, this isn't really "proof" of anything. A follow-up tweet[0] says "If you take the 2-hr video and stack the images, the astronomical wonders appear to get lost behind the web of satellite trails. 60s exposures, 4.4degX4.4deg", but was there some astronomical objective behind stacking 2 hours worth of frames, or was this just done to create a pretty/scary picture? [0] https://twitter.com/RAOastronomy/status/1395968612385529858 https://twitter.com/RAOastronomy/status/1395968612385529858
- mlindner 5y ago
  The tweet is even misleading. If you stack frames normally that transient data is removed, the "star trails" disappear. It's only in this other type of stacking are non-transient things not removed and instead amplified.
notJim 5y ago
What I find kind of frustrating about all of this is that it's really a lack of mandated and/or publicly-funded investment in infrastructure that even makes starlink appealing. When electricity came about, there was a massive project to electrify rural areas, so we didn't need to launch a constellation of satellites beaming microwave power to the whole planet. And now electricity is ubiquitous. There's no quibbling about whether a given area is profitable or not, because electricity is seen as a necessity for modern life. Internet should be seen the same way, and the necessary physical infrastructure should be built. The only reason it hasn't is that the telecom companies have bought out the government. So instead, we get these end-runs around the system that have massive externalities.
- 8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y ago
  > The only reason it hasn't is that the telecom companies have bought out the government. I don't think this is true really. There's been a really big shift in the last 50-ish years and at least in the US there seems to be a general consensus that projects of this nature are no longer the domain of the government. I mean the telecom thing is a factor sure but I don't think you'd see that level of investment in infrastructure for anything else at this point either.
- rektide 5y ago
  I for one think the Supreme Court is the one who ruined everything. Verizon Inc v FCC (2002)[1] dismantled the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which had been working effectively to decouple physical infrastructure from internet service providing. The Supreme Court sided with Verizon, who said basically "fiber is too expensive for us to be able to deploy, unless we get a monopoly over the infrastructure we build". This has lead to enormous stagnation. DSL remained a competitive service, with a variety of competing entities, in the 90's & early aughts, because it still remained under the Telecommunications Act, of unbundled network elements, because of unbundled local loops. As soon as one company was allowed to own the infrastructure & every means to connect over it, the system of competition & innovation that had been working went away. Now a days we have municipal service providers getting started. They too will exist in these same terms, as local infrastructure monopolies. They won't have a regulatory framework that systems like POTS / copper have, won't have any standards for cooperation / competition, since fiber as a whole has never been unbundled. Overall, I see this as a great potential weakness for municipal isps, and it's something I think the left & right might be interested in rectifying. It could be done municipality by municipality, with promises, but I for one think many people on many sides of the political spectrum have an interest in fixing this radical overreach & colossal corporate favoritism that was gifted by the Supreme Court. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._v._FCC_(2002) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._v....
Nihilartikel 5y ago
Not to defend Starlink or purveyors of other obtrusive orbital spraff, but how much astronomical imaging is optical/non-computational these days? As a non-astronomer my curiosity is, given publicly available ephemera for the microsat constellations, could a post-processing stage reasonably remove their streaks from the exposures being summed together? Granted this would probably only be feasible for non-hobbyists.
HPsquared 5y ago
Satellite trails are only visible just after sunset, and just before sunrise.
- freemint 5y ago
  This strongly depends on at what wave lengths you look.
  - mlindner 5y ago
    I've yet to see any radio astronomy or infrared astronomy images of Starlink satellites (that are not also from solar reflections). If you have sources, feel free to post them.
pftburger 5y ago
Solve it in software. This really seems like a UX problem. We’re trained in the UX of long exposure film, and tools to do it differently aren’t built into the cameras these people use. Pretty sure the iPhone’s long exposure doesn’t amplify moving objects That said, let’s tax satellites and fund, I dunno, space cleanup or astronomy or some such. Maybe treat space more like an earth wide resource and less like the Wild West.
- freemint 5y ago
  It's more than an UX problem. It's an signal integrity issue and the only way around it for all kinds of measurement is to only look where there is no Starlink. An area that grows ever smaller with the pissing contest between mega constellations owned by billionaires. Taxing and having placement in LEO controlled is a good idea. We should also leave space for developing nations.
Yaina 5y ago
What I think is infuriating that companies and countries can just put up as many satellites up there as they want. If you put dangerous[1][2] garbage in the sky you should have some responsibility to keep it safe and clean up. IMHO the risk of putting these things up outweigh any potential benefit for underserved regions. Musk could've also invested in ground-based communications infrastructure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS1ibDImAYU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS1ibDImAYU
- mlindner 5y ago
  Firstly, that Kurzgesagt video had numerous errors in it including ridiculously false lines like "3-4 satellites are getting destroyed this way every year." The source for that specific line was a politician, not a scientist. The video is not a legitimate source. Secondly, the Kessler syndrome is believed to already be happening by some, but it's a slow process that occurs over 10s to 100s of years and doesn't result in any of the popular depictions like in Gravity or in Wall-e. The Kessler syndrome also does not happen at altitudes where debris are rapidly removed by the atmosphere, which is where Starlink operates in. So even if you were to spontaneously blow up all the Starlink satellites (not at all realistic), the debris would be largely removed after less than a decade. Thirdly, as mentioned Starlink operates specifically in a region of space that is reasonably rapidly (within the order of a few years) cleared up of any non-functioning satellites or debris. Fourthly, you can't call operational satellites with the ability to actively avoid debris and other satellites "dangerous garbage". You could use that term for cubesats with no on-board propulsion possibly, but not Starlink. > IMHO the risk of putting these things up outweigh any potential benefit for underserved regions. The risk is overstated and it's easy to ignore the benefits if it doesn't improve your own life. > Musk could've also invested in ground-based communications infrastructure. If it was so cheap to improve ground-based communications infrastructure it would have been done already. (And it has been in most areas of many European countries because of the density of their populations, but that's not true everywhere)
  - freemint 5y ago
    > The Kessler syndrome also does not happen at altitudes where debris are rapidly removed by the atmosphere Citation needed. If the are enough satellites any decay rate can become irrelevant. > Secondly, the Kessler syndrome is believed to already be happening by some, but it's a slow process that occurs over 10s to 100s of years and doesn't result in any of the popular depictions like in Gravity or in Wall-e. It's slow right now but the expected growth behavior is worse than exponential (dx/dt ~ x^2 vs dx/dt ~ x) and internationally we have fully failed to stop an (dx/dt ~ x) process in the last year. > Thirdly, as mentioned Starlink operates specifically in a region of space that is reasonably rapidly (within the order of a few years) cleared up of any non-functioning satellites or debris. Space junk by definition is unassisted and uncontrolled. So it's not like you aim to present it that any Kessler syndrome will be over in the same time. > The United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requires CubeSats and other picosatellites to be designed to re-enter the atmosphere within 25 years of the end of their useful lifetimes. Without an assistance, it is estimated that a CubeSat may take over 150 years to de-orbit from an 800 km altitude. 800km is well within low earth orbit. > Fourthly, you can't call operational satellites with the ability to actively avoid debris and other satellites "dangerous garbage". You could use that term for cubesats with no on-board propulsion possibly, but not Starlink. It doesn't help if those thrusters are not used by Starlink as they failed to do here: http://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/ESA_spacecraft_dodges_large_constellation http://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/ESA_spacecraft_dodges_lar... Starlink (or OneWeb pick one) might be living in an alternative reality with regards to collision risks as this situation shows https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/04/spacex-says-oneweb-spread-false-story-of-near-miss-satellite-collision/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/04/space... (read the update for more details). As there can be no disagreement with in Newtonian or Einsteinian physics whether or not there was a risk of collision.
mlindner 5y ago
Random musings, but this twitter account is quite "out there", I do wonder who follows these types of people such that they get popular enough to get posted on to hacker news. The account only has 1000 followers.
jjk166 5y ago
These issues only affect a specific form of photography taken under select conditions, and even then can be dealt with quite easily in software, making the problem at most an extremely minor nuisance to a select few. Conversely, very large numbers of people live in remote locations where satellite communication is by far the most sensible method of connecting them to the internet. It seems a small price to pay. [The following was the original flagged comment, which I'm leaving for completeness but shouldn't have posted as such] Oh no, extremely long exposure photographs at certain wavelengths taken under select conditions need a small amount of additional post processing which is trivially automated. How dare those rural peasants who want to connect to the rest of humanity inconvenience us so!
- dang 5y ago
  Please do not take HN threads into flamewar hell, regardless of how provocative someone else's statement is or you feel it is. That is the way a forum like this destroys itself, and that is in none of our interests. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - mk81 5y ago
    But post stuff that calls worldwide internet connectivity "a bullshit vanity project"?
    - dang 5y ago
      Certainly the OP is not optimal for a thoughtful, substantive discussion. But responding to flamebait with flamewar is exactly what the HN guidelines ask everyone not to do here. The thing to do with such a provocation is to leave it where you found it and move on to more interesting things. Dragging it into the comments and setting it on fire is definitely not the thing to do. I know how tempting it is, though; it's a temptation we all need to cultivate resistance to, which is hard work. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - jjk166 5y ago
ALittleLight 5y ago
Can't this be removed in software? I'm not a photography expert, but it seems like the satellites are predictable in intensity and position. I assume you could analyze a long exposure or individual frames of it and pick out and remove the satellites pretty easily. The tweeter also complains about the high price of space based telescopes, but neglects that starlink funds (or will fund) Space X which may substantially reduce the cost of putting up big space telescopes in the future.
- ortusdux 5y ago
  The standard technique is called stacking, wherein you take many images and combine them to reduce noise. There is a fair amount of software out there that makes it pretty easy. https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/astrophotography/astrophoto-tips/a-guide-to-astrophotography-stacking/ https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/astrophotography/astropho... https://dopeguides.com/astrophotography-stacking-software/ https://dopeguides.com/astrophotography-stacking-software/
- danaris 5y ago
  If what you want is a pretty picture, sure. If what you want is an accurate view of the sky, then no: once you've taken the picture with the satellite in it, any technique that removes the satellite cannot add back in what it obscured by taking up space in the picture. Image editing cannot make this better for science, only for art.
foxyv 5y ago
This happens with airplanes too. You just have to reject the parts of the frames from the stack that have the nearby object in the view. Sure if we were using film this would be a problem, but with good software you can do some amazing deep sky imaging using nothing but a 12 inch telescope and a DSLR. Also, maybe he just doesn't know about PixInsight... https://pixinsight.com/ https://pixinsight.com/
rich_sasha 5y ago
We are increasingly finding that polluting the environment in the past, which we thought harmless, isn’t. In that spirit, we should avoiding breaking things and polluting common resources, even if we can’t obviously see what the damage is.
- mlindner 5y ago
  I agree, were this actually pollution. If a court ordered it, this is immediately and permanently reversible. So there's no permanent harm done.
  - Dah00n 5y ago
    Not likely unless you by court mean US court. If any other court find that there's evidence this is bad for some reason then nothing will happen. Space should be decided over by everyone. We need better, more restrictive, laws.
    - mlindner 5y ago
      Yes I mean a US court. They're the only court with jurisdiction. > Space should be decided over by everyone. I would disagree.
      - Dah00n 5y ago
        So who should decide then? If China/Russia/Iran/North Korea launches a lot of satellites is that okay too? What if they mainly fly around above the US for whatever reason? If space is free the US can't complain.
        mlindner 5y ago
        > If China/Russia/Iran/North Korea launches a lot of satellites is that okay too? What if they mainly fly around above the US for whatever reason? If space is free the US can't complain. This has been already been happening since the Cold War. So yes, the US is used to it.

64 points by brundolf 5y ago

On the face of it, a composite image of space that has no adjustments being ruined by 2x the number of satellites does seem pretty bad and damaging for researchers. Beyond that, it still might be worth it to actually be able to provide internet to people that either don't have access, have an insane cost to access, and/or have a bad provider currently. The argument I've seen is that this stuff can be adjusted for and that most researchers have already had to adjust for it (since there are ~1500 non-Starlink satellites already). Is that just an utter fallacy?

mh- 5y ago
(Disclaimer: I know ~nothing about astronomy) The other claim I've seen is that once the satellites reach their operational orbit (~4 months after launch), they are no longer visible. I don't know if this has been proven/disproven yet. Curious if anyone in-the-know can comment.
- ortusdux 5y ago
  They are no longer visible to the naked eye. The satellites are initially inserted at ~half their final orbit. They then boot up, deploy their solar panels horizontally to reduce drag, and then fire up their engines for the boost to their final orbit. This takes about a month or so. Once there, they rotate their panels to point away from the earth, which greatly reduces their apparent brightness.
- mlindner 5y ago
  You're correct that they are no longer visible to the naked eye. They're reduced down to (right now) approximately 6th magnitude and SpaceX is trying to get them down to 7th magnitude. The human eye in a perfectly or almost perfectly dark sky can see down to roughly (humans vary quite a bit) 6th magnitude but it would be very hard, especially for a moving object. In order to see 6th magnitude you need a very dark sky (no moon or clouds, low humidity, no human populations anywhere nearby), you would need to dark adapt for over 30 minutes with no viewing of any sources of light, you'd need to be pretty young, and then you'd need to use averted-vision viewing where you look near an object, but not directly at it such that you can use the higher density of rods in the rest of your eye in order to see the object. You'd then have a chance of seeing current Starlink satellites, but you'd see a ton of other satellites as well as there's many satellites above 6th magnitude. (In 2017 or so I was in rural Nebraska the night before the solar eclipse and it felt like there was a half dozen visible satellites in the sky at any given time.) However that doesn't mean they're not visible to telescopes.
adrian_b 5y ago
Image processing is not magic. Obviously you can remove the satellite traces from the image, but each of them causes a degradation in quality, i.e. a reduction in the signal-to-noise ratio, because the light coming from the sky zones obscured by the satellites has not been captured by the sensors. Regardless how well you might process the sky images, the large increase in the number of satellites will reduce their quality.
- invisible 5y ago
  It makes sense that each frame would suffer from signal-to-noise problems and be degraded, but given that this image was created over 2 hours -- is there really any loss in quality if sampled correctly? I could honestly believe there are a bunch of complexities beyond this, but: is this already having to be done _anyway_?
- mlindner 5y ago
  > Regardless how well you might process the sky images, the large increase in the number of satellites will reduce their quality. Right, this is the true statement of the issue. However is a _marginal_ loss in image data quality really not that bad a thing to ask for for getting internet across the planet effectively (in human history terms) overnight?
invisible 5y ago
I turned up the person who actually made the image, and their choice for how they made this image makes me confused: https://twitter.com/GrumpyOldAstro/status/1396370610368831490?s=20 https://twitter.com/GrumpyOldAstro/status/139637061036883149... Essentially, they chose to multiply any light from all of the frames.

slg 5y ago

Musk is an easy scapegoat and blaming him personally removes the complexity of an issue that has real pros and cons on both sides.

TremendousJudge 5y ago
You don't get to advertise all the projects by companies you own as "Elon Musk's X" while also avoiding to take blame for their failure
- mlindner 5y ago
  Invariably when negative news is about Tesla or SpaceX, "Elon Musk's X" is in the title. When the reverse is true I see it much less often. In either case adding "Elon Musk's X" into the title is clickbait and should not be done, for positive or negative news.
- slg 5y ago
  >avoiding to take blame for their failure It is way too early to call this a "failure" and the problem here is not Musk himself doing this but the governmental regulation that allows it. If Musk wasn't putting up these satellites, someone else would. Maybe not today, but eventually. As a society we need to do a better job blaming the systems that allow something to happen rather than the individuals who exist in and use that system.
  - Daho0n 5y ago
    If Russia did this they would risk making the cold war less cold if it allowed Americans access. The problem here is that the US will not do anything to stop this even if the rest of earth didn't like the idea. We need to have modern laws instead of the mess we have now before something bad happens.
cyberlurker 5y ago
If he (scapegoat or not) popularizes the debate over orbital debris now before it becomes a bigger problem, great.

pwinnski 5y ago

This, combined with the really mediocre service available from Starlink[0], combined with the plan to put up many thousands more satellites, is truly disheartening. 0. https://www.theverge.com/22435030/starlink-satellite-internet-spacex-review https://www.theverge.com/22435030/starlink-satellite-interne...

1023bytes 5y ago
Mediocre maybe compared to fiber
cyberlurker 5y ago
Yea, I wish we’d go back to the “Google fiber” days of a disruptive tech company laying cable and fiber optics everywhere. And before someone says it, Yes yes, Google bad, but I liked the initiative.
- pwinnski 5y ago
  Google was making it work before incumbent companies sued and blocked them[0]. The problem with broadband in the US is not technical, and it's not solely distances or the nature of rural spaces. It's political and economic. We managed to deliver electricity and then telephone to everyone with a push from the federal government, we could do it again. But now AT&T, Comcast and Time-Warner are too powerful, so we end up with ground-based telescopes suffering instead. 0. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160314/09374733901/isps-are-blocking-google-fibers-access-to-utility-poles-california.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160314/09374733901/isps-...
  - mlindner 5y ago
    > so we end up without a night sky. Please don't use hyperbole like this as some people believe it and it confuses the conversation. Starlink will not erase the night sky. Starlink in operational orbits is not human eye visible. This is only a concern for ground based telescopes, not the average person viewing the night sky.

ralph84 5y ago

> As a researcher, to those who backed Musk and the like on this bullshit vanity project; Fuck you, he's stealing the fucking sky from us Why does the sky only belong to researchers and not all of humanity? The number of humans interested in faster internet far exceeds the number of humans interested in earth-based telescopes.

noodlesUK 5y ago
I’m not a researcher, and when I look at that photo, I feel like the sky is being stolen. It’s that it’s for one man’s company, not for all humanity. The lack of internet coverage in the US is a solvable problem driven by idiotic politics, and land based solutions will always be lower latency/faster if built right.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  Playing devil's advocate, if a problem is solvable but politics prevent it from being solved, the problem is not solvable.
  - noodlesUK 5y ago
    You’re totally right to an extent. It means that any solution to that problem is political of course, rather than technical. This is an interesting example where a company’s business model is effectively a technical workaround to a political problem
- _Microft 5y ago
  > not for all humanity Starlink does theoretically solve the problem of internet access for everyone, everywhere. At once.
  - noodlesUK 5y ago
    For all those who can afford it, subject to the whims of a company controlled by one man. The sky is beautiful and free for anyone who can look up towards it.

sxates 5y ago

It sucks to lose something you always had and took for granted. I wonder what the reverse situation would look like - if everyone on the planet had easy access to high speed satellite internet, and astronomers came along and insisted we had to pull the whole thing down so we could study stars. Would that be an equal or un-equal tragedy?

adrian_b 5y ago
The comparison is really meaningless, because for looking towards the surrounding space there is no other way, while for Internet access there are many alternatives both cheaper and faster than a network of satellites. Many years ago I have worked as a designer of equipment for long-distance wireless communication links for Internet access. I have no doubt that it would be possible to cover all the remote areas of USA with a network of towers with directional antennas for the links between themselves at a lower cost and with better performance than SpaceX's constellation of satellites. The reason why this has not been done is not technical. The fact that the communication services offered by SpaceX are more advantageous than the alternatives available in USA is a historical accident, not something caused by objective reality. The difference between the solution implemented by SpaceX and a ground-based solution is that to be able to provide their services SpaceX occupies resources that they do not own. The sky does not belong to SpaceX, I and billions of other humans who will never use the services of SpaceX have as much rights to the sky as the SpaceX customers, so SpaceX is stealing from us to serve their customers. This is the same like someone who chooses to smoke in a public place besides me. I do not care if he smokes at his home, that is his right, but if he smokes besides me and forces me to inhale his smoke, I consider that an aggression. In the same way, occupying the sky with satellites is a nuisance and an aggression towards all those who are not SpaceX customers and who have not agreed that SpaceX may use in this way something that belongs to all humans, not to an US company or to an US agency.
- mlindner 5y ago
  > because for looking towards the surrounding space there is no other way This doesn't prevent them from looking outwards towards the surrounding space. It just makes the data a bit more noisy once processing is completed. It doesn't completely obscure anything (unless that thing was incredibly faint and near the noise floor anyway). > while for Internet access there are many alternatives both cheaper and faster than a network of satellites. If there were "many alternatives both cheaper and faster", people would not be going literally crazy over waiting for the service to become available at their premises. You can see such people moping and complaining on threads everywhere while they wait for service to become available. For the market where Starlink is wanted there are often no options that are faster and in some cases not even any options that are cheaper. I've heard several anecdotes of people who were paying $200+ a month for around 1 mbps for internet service before they got Starlink.

chomp 5y ago

What's the point of this profane tweet? Starlink is rural people's best hope of finally not being an afterthought, not just in America, but around the world. And this problem can be trivially solved with stacking. There's nothing of substance here, just more internet vitriol.

8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y ago
No, you're embedding a bunch of viewpoints in this comment as facts when there is absolutely room for disagreement. For example I think "rural people's best hope of finally not being an afterthought" is massive government infrastructure projects that don't factor in profitability. Note that I am not trying to _have_ this discussion here, just pointing out that it's a valid disagreement. And the author of that tweet it seems considers this a loss of an ancient and fundamental shared planetary resource. I think anger is an understandable, even appropriate reaction to that perception! The point is to get people to talk about it and maybe also not just accept the neoliberal consensus about the role of technology and infrastructure and their externalities. Seems to have succeeded by that measure. There is plenty of substance here but you're using the author's anger and profanity as an excuse to not engage with it.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  How is a massive government infrastructure program that doesn't exist an alternative to a satellite system that does exist? If I'm out in a rural location I can either use satellites for internet or the non-existent government program? It's also clearly not a loss of an ancient planetary resource. The satellites can't be seen with the naked eye so the vast majority won't notice. Astral photographers and astronomers may have to do slightly more post-processing on certain types of images, but that hardly seems like a big deal.
happytoexplain 5y ago
I can sympathize with the extreme emotions on display here. Some things are worth shouting about. Some things are worth saying "fuck you" about. Some things are that important. That said, yes, we should focus on the big picture in places like HN. That doesn't mean we ignore or disparage the mere mortals who care so much about the sky.

visviva 5y ago

Not to minimize the impact that large constellations *could* have on ground-based astronomy, but without more context, this isn't really "proof" of anything. A follow-up tweet[0] says "If you take the 2-hr video and stack the images, the astronomical wonders appear to get lost behind the web of satellite trails. 60s exposures, 4.4degX4.4deg", but was there some astronomical objective behind stacking 2 hours worth of frames, or was this just done to create a pretty/scary picture? [0] https://twitter.com/RAOastronomy/status/1395968612385529858 https://twitter.com/RAOastronomy/status/1395968612385529858

mlindner 5y ago
The tweet is even misleading. If you stack frames normally that transient data is removed, the "star trails" disappear. It's only in this other type of stacking are non-transient things not removed and instead amplified.

notJim 5y ago

What I find kind of frustrating about all of this is that it's really a lack of mandated and/or publicly-funded investment in infrastructure that even makes starlink appealing. When electricity came about, there was a massive project to electrify rural areas, so we didn't need to launch a constellation of satellites beaming microwave power to the whole planet. And now electricity is ubiquitous. There's no quibbling about whether a given area is profitable or not, because electricity is seen as a necessity for modern life. Internet should be seen the same way, and the necessary physical infrastructure should be built. The only reason it hasn't is that the telecom companies have bought out the government. So instead, we get these end-runs around the system that have massive externalities.

8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y ago
> The only reason it hasn't is that the telecom companies have bought out the government. I don't think this is true really. There's been a really big shift in the last 50-ish years and at least in the US there seems to be a general consensus that projects of this nature are no longer the domain of the government. I mean the telecom thing is a factor sure but I don't think you'd see that level of investment in infrastructure for anything else at this point either.
rektide 5y ago
I for one think the Supreme Court is the one who ruined everything. Verizon Inc v FCC (2002)[1] dismantled the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which had been working effectively to decouple physical infrastructure from internet service providing. The Supreme Court sided with Verizon, who said basically "fiber is too expensive for us to be able to deploy, unless we get a monopoly over the infrastructure we build". This has lead to enormous stagnation. DSL remained a competitive service, with a variety of competing entities, in the 90's & early aughts, because it still remained under the Telecommunications Act, of unbundled network elements, because of unbundled local loops. As soon as one company was allowed to own the infrastructure & every means to connect over it, the system of competition & innovation that had been working went away. Now a days we have municipal service providers getting started. They too will exist in these same terms, as local infrastructure monopolies. They won't have a regulatory framework that systems like POTS / copper have, won't have any standards for cooperation / competition, since fiber as a whole has never been unbundled. Overall, I see this as a great potential weakness for municipal isps, and it's something I think the left & right might be interested in rectifying. It could be done municipality by municipality, with promises, but I for one think many people on many sides of the political spectrum have an interest in fixing this radical overreach & colossal corporate favoritism that was gifted by the Supreme Court. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._v._FCC_(2002) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._v....

Nihilartikel 5y ago

Not to defend Starlink or purveyors of other obtrusive orbital spraff, but how much astronomical imaging is optical/non-computational these days? As a non-astronomer my curiosity is, given publicly available ephemera for the microsat constellations, could a post-processing stage reasonably remove their streaks from the exposures being summed together? Granted this would probably only be feasible for non-hobbyists.

HPsquared 5y ago

Satellite trails are only visible just after sunset, and just before sunrise.

freemint 5y ago
This strongly depends on at what wave lengths you look.
- mlindner 5y ago
  I've yet to see any radio astronomy or infrared astronomy images of Starlink satellites (that are not also from solar reflections). If you have sources, feel free to post them.

pftburger 5y ago

Solve it in software. This really seems like a UX problem. We’re trained in the UX of long exposure film, and tools to do it differently aren’t built into the cameras these people use. Pretty sure the iPhone’s long exposure doesn’t amplify moving objects That said, let’s tax satellites and fund, I dunno, space cleanup or astronomy or some such. Maybe treat space more like an earth wide resource and less like the Wild West.

freemint 5y ago
It's more than an UX problem. It's an signal integrity issue and the only way around it for all kinds of measurement is to only look where there is no Starlink. An area that grows ever smaller with the pissing contest between mega constellations owned by billionaires. Taxing and having placement in LEO controlled is a good idea. We should also leave space for developing nations.

Yaina 5y ago

What I think is infuriating that companies and countries can just put up as many satellites up there as they want. If you put dangerous[1][2] garbage in the sky you should have some responsibility to keep it safe and clean up. IMHO the risk of putting these things up outweigh any potential benefit for underserved regions. Musk could've also invested in ground-based communications infrastructure. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS1ibDImAYU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS1ibDImAYU

mlindner 5y ago
Firstly, that Kurzgesagt video had numerous errors in it including ridiculously false lines like "3-4 satellites are getting destroyed this way every year." The source for that specific line was a politician, not a scientist. The video is not a legitimate source. Secondly, the Kessler syndrome is believed to already be happening by some, but it's a slow process that occurs over 10s to 100s of years and doesn't result in any of the popular depictions like in Gravity or in Wall-e. The Kessler syndrome also does not happen at altitudes where debris are rapidly removed by the atmosphere, which is where Starlink operates in. So even if you were to spontaneously blow up all the Starlink satellites (not at all realistic), the debris would be largely removed after less than a decade. Thirdly, as mentioned Starlink operates specifically in a region of space that is reasonably rapidly (within the order of a few years) cleared up of any non-functioning satellites or debris. Fourthly, you can't call operational satellites with the ability to actively avoid debris and other satellites "dangerous garbage". You could use that term for cubesats with no on-board propulsion possibly, but not Starlink. > IMHO the risk of putting these things up outweigh any potential benefit for underserved regions. The risk is overstated and it's easy to ignore the benefits if it doesn't improve your own life. > Musk could've also invested in ground-based communications infrastructure. If it was so cheap to improve ground-based communications infrastructure it would have been done already. (And it has been in most areas of many European countries because of the density of their populations, but that's not true everywhere)
- freemint 5y ago
  > The Kessler syndrome also does not happen at altitudes where debris are rapidly removed by the atmosphere Citation needed. If the are enough satellites any decay rate can become irrelevant. > Secondly, the Kessler syndrome is believed to already be happening by some, but it's a slow process that occurs over 10s to 100s of years and doesn't result in any of the popular depictions like in Gravity or in Wall-e. It's slow right now but the expected growth behavior is worse than exponential (dx/dt ~ x^2 vs dx/dt ~ x) and internationally we have fully failed to stop an (dx/dt ~ x) process in the last year. > Thirdly, as mentioned Starlink operates specifically in a region of space that is reasonably rapidly (within the order of a few years) cleared up of any non-functioning satellites or debris. Space junk by definition is unassisted and uncontrolled. So it's not like you aim to present it that any Kessler syndrome will be over in the same time. > The United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requires CubeSats and other picosatellites to be designed to re-enter the atmosphere within 25 years of the end of their useful lifetimes. Without an assistance, it is estimated that a CubeSat may take over 150 years to de-orbit from an 800 km altitude. 800km is well within low earth orbit. > Fourthly, you can't call operational satellites with the ability to actively avoid debris and other satellites "dangerous garbage". You could use that term for cubesats with no on-board propulsion possibly, but not Starlink. It doesn't help if those thrusters are not used by Starlink as they failed to do here: http://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/ESA_spacecraft_dodges_large_constellation http://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/ESA_spacecraft_dodges_lar... Starlink (or OneWeb pick one) might be living in an alternative reality with regards to collision risks as this situation shows https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/04/spacex-says-oneweb-spread-false-story-of-near-miss-satellite-collision/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/04/space... (read the update for more details). As there can be no disagreement with in Newtonian or Einsteinian physics whether or not there was a risk of collision.

mlindner 5y ago

Random musings, but this twitter account is quite "out there", I do wonder who follows these types of people such that they get popular enough to get posted on to hacker news. The account only has 1000 followers.

jjk166 5y ago

These issues only affect a specific form of photography taken under select conditions, and even then can be dealt with quite easily in software, making the problem at most an extremely minor nuisance to a select few. Conversely, very large numbers of people live in remote locations where satellite communication is by far the most sensible method of connecting them to the internet. It seems a small price to pay. [The following was the original flagged comment, which I'm leaving for completeness but shouldn't have posted as such] Oh no, extremely long exposure photographs at certain wavelengths taken under select conditions need a small amount of additional post processing which is trivially automated. How dare those rural peasants who want to connect to the rest of humanity inconvenience us so!

dang 5y ago
Please do not take HN threads into flamewar hell, regardless of how provocative someone else's statement is or you feel it is. That is the way a forum like this destroys itself, and that is in none of our interests. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mk81 5y ago
  But post stuff that calls worldwide internet connectivity "a bullshit vanity project"?
  - dang 5y ago
    Certainly the OP is not optimal for a thoughtful, substantive discussion. But responding to flamebait with flamewar is exactly what the HN guidelines ask everyone not to do here. The thing to do with such a provocation is to leave it where you found it and move on to more interesting things. Dragging it into the comments and setting it on fire is definitely not the thing to do. I know how tempting it is, though; it's a temptation we all need to cultivate resistance to, which is hard work. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jjk166 5y ago

ALittleLight 5y ago

Can't this be removed in software? I'm not a photography expert, but it seems like the satellites are predictable in intensity and position. I assume you could analyze a long exposure or individual frames of it and pick out and remove the satellites pretty easily. The tweeter also complains about the high price of space based telescopes, but neglects that starlink funds (or will fund) Space X which may substantially reduce the cost of putting up big space telescopes in the future.

ortusdux 5y ago
The standard technique is called stacking, wherein you take many images and combine them to reduce noise. There is a fair amount of software out there that makes it pretty easy. https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/astrophotography/astrophoto-tips/a-guide-to-astrophotography-stacking/ https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/astrophotography/astropho... https://dopeguides.com/astrophotography-stacking-software/ https://dopeguides.com/astrophotography-stacking-software/
danaris 5y ago
If what you want is a pretty picture, sure. If what you want is an accurate view of the sky, then no: once you've taken the picture with the satellite in it, any technique that removes the satellite cannot add back in what it obscured by taking up space in the picture. Image editing cannot make this better for science, only for art.

foxyv 5y ago

This happens with airplanes too. You just have to reject the parts of the frames from the stack that have the nearby object in the view. Sure if we were using film this would be a problem, but with good software you can do some amazing deep sky imaging using nothing but a 12 inch telescope and a DSLR. Also, maybe he just doesn't know about PixInsight... https://pixinsight.com/ https://pixinsight.com/

rich_sasha 5y ago

We are increasingly finding that polluting the environment in the past, which we thought harmless, isn’t. In that spirit, we should avoiding breaking things and polluting common resources, even if we can’t obviously see what the damage is.

mlindner 5y ago
I agree, were this actually pollution. If a court ordered it, this is immediately and permanently reversible. So there's no permanent harm done.
- Dah00n 5y ago
  Not likely unless you by court mean US court. If any other court find that there's evidence this is bad for some reason then nothing will happen. Space should be decided over by everyone. We need better, more restrictive, laws.
  - mlindner 5y ago
    Yes I mean a US court. They're the only court with jurisdiction. > Space should be decided over by everyone. I would disagree.
    - Dah00n 5y ago
      So who should decide then? If China/Russia/Iran/North Korea launches a lot of satellites is that okay too? What if they mainly fly around above the US for whatever reason? If space is free the US can't complain.
      - mlindner 5y ago
        > If China/Russia/Iran/North Korea launches a lot of satellites is that okay too? What if they mainly fly around above the US for whatever reason? If space is free the US can't complain. This has been already been happening since the Cold War. So yes, the US is used to it.