4 ms·

It's mostly solved for well-funded researchers with modern professional-grade telescopes and professional-grade analysis software. That's far from pervasive. "

It's mostly solved for well-funded researchers with modern professional-grade telescopes and professional-grade analysis software. That's far from pervasive. "100% known" is overstating the situation, there's no easy-to-use API for an amateur to query location, date and time, alignment, frames, and pixels to get the location of satellites. Amateurs with basic software - or researchers who don't have the funding/equipment/software triad - just pointing a DSLR at the sky have to manually stack their images, for these users it's far easier to use a long exposure. The other problem is that sensor thermal and atmospheric noise vs. photon signal ratio is mitigated by long exposures in a way that's not the same as stacking short-exposure images, each with their own changing contribution to noise.

PeterisP 5y ago
If we're talking about the tradeoffs between feasibility of astronomy as a whole versus the interests of (potential) users of satellite internet, that may be an interesting debate, but if it's a situation where professional astronomy at major scientific institutions would be mostly okay but just amateur astronomers would be shafted, then I'm afraid that the debate would be very one-sided. Telecommunications is arguably more important for societies than astronomy - that might be debated, but they're definitely more important than amateur astronomy. Amateur astronomers are a sufficiently small niche with limited practical influence so that any society - no matter if democratic or authoritarian - would IMHO quickly decide that sacrificing the whole hobby of amateur astronomy as such would be a trivial cost to pay for even small practical gains in rural telecommunications (which affect far, far more people than amateur astronomers), otherwise it would be a tail wagging the dog. Amateur astronomers can have their voice heard - and taken into account if it's not too difficult (e.g. the changes in Starlink satellite coloring to reduce brightness is a good example) but they do not get veto rights. Their interests matter if there are no conflicts, but when multiple interests collide, the niche community will likely have to concede. You might convince societies that certain results of astronomy are essential and should not be traded away, but if these important results can be obtained even if "researchers who don't have the funding/equipment/software" are excluded, well, then excluding them is a plausible (and even likely) option and amateur astronomers will have to just take it and tolerate satellite streaks in their pictures.

PeterisP 5y ago

If we're talking about the tradeoffs between feasibility of astronomy as a whole versus the interests of (potential) users of satellite internet, that may be an interesting debate, but if it's a situation where professional astronomy at major scientific institutions would be mostly okay but just amateur astronomers would be shafted, then I'm afraid that the debate would be very one-sided. Telecommunications is arguably more important for societies than astronomy - that might be debated, but they're definitely more important than amateur astronomy. Amateur astronomers are a sufficiently small niche with limited practical influence so that any society - no matter if democratic or authoritarian - would IMHO quickly decide that sacrificing the whole hobby of amateur astronomy as such would be a trivial cost to pay for even small practical gains in rural telecommunications (which affect far, far more people than amateur astronomers), otherwise it would be a tail wagging the dog. Amateur astronomers can have their voice heard - and taken into account if it's not too difficult (e.g. the changes in Starlink satellite coloring to reduce brightness is a good example) but they do not get veto rights. Their interests matter if there are no conflicts, but when multiple interests collide, the niche community will likely have to concede. You might convince societies that certain results of astronomy are essential and should not be traded away, but if these important results can be obtained even if "researchers who don't have the funding/equipment/software" are excluded, well, then excluding them is a plausible (and even likely) option and amateur astronomers will have to just take it and tolerate satellite streaks in their pictures.