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When people complain about the effects rocketry and space colonization will have on astronomy, this is what I think about. Like... How many people complaining
by shadowgovt 4y ago
When people complain about the effects rocketry and space colonization will have on astronomy, this is what I think about.
Like... How many people complaining about the effects of Starlink satellites have ever actually seen a Starlink chain drift by, like beads on an invisible string?
It's mesmerizing.
- femiagbabiaka 4y agoIt's mesmerizing now at small scale, at anything resembling the kind of scale I think SpaceX wants to target it'll just be noise, like contrails.
- subpixel 4y agoI saw one once and my immediate thought was that I hope such an aberration of my natural view of the sky doesn't become common. I would describe it as eery.
- pjot 4y agoI think we’re already past that point. I can hardly see stars now given the amount of light pollution my city puts off. Little dots zipping around won’t change much.
- philwelch 4y agoI think we're in an in-between stage--at some point, it'll be within reach for people who want an uninterrupted view of the night sky to catch a ride into orbit and just look out the window up there.
- JohnFen 4y ago> it'll be within reach for people who want an uninterrupted view of the night sky to catch a ride into orbit The thought that would be necessary just to see the night sky depresses me beyond belief.
- philwelch 4y agoYou'll still be able to see the night sky (if you're far enough outside a city)--there will just be a lot more lights in it :)
- capableweb 4y agoThe difference is that at least light pollution from the ground/cities you can at least get away from by going to remote places. The satellites you can't really do anything about, they'll appear no matter where you go, even in the middle of nowhere.
- unixgoddess 4y agothis. same problem with noise pollution, but worse as you can't close your ears
- Beldin 4y agoPerhaps, if you were to move (as in: relocate), you might find that we're not completely past this point yet.
- pjot 4y agoAt least in the US, over 80% of the population lives in an urban area - practically speaking, we’ve passed the mark.
- serf 4y agothat's kind of a self-centered rationalization. "We in the city can no longer see the night sky, so it's now an unimportant issue." SpaceX sky-litter is the first time that i've had my night-sky obstructed far-far off-coast on the ocean; that feels significant somehow.
- shadowgovt 4y agoEerier than the infinite void with points of light suspended in it by nothing at all?
- subpixel 4y agoEery like the beautiful display of color that oil reflcts when it's suspended on water.
- darreninthenet 4y agoMy wife and I were sitting outside chatting around our fire pit in our back garden as do sometimes when the weathers nice and we saw this row of continuous white dots all evenly spaced passing over us and we were like "what the f????" as it was obviously not natural. Quick post on Facebook gave us the answer but yeah at the time it really was a "wow" moment
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- buran77 4y agoCars were mesmerizing at one point. The novelty wears off and even if the utility is still there, the drawbacks are no longer hidden by the glitter that for some reason catches some eyes. People who care about the night sky won't be impressed by that sight more than by actual beads on a string. Certainly not for long, especially when they realize what it means for that night sky.
- mlindner 4y agoExcept those beads on a string will not be a normal or regular sight. They're a coincidence of deployment mechanism, separation method, satellite design, and orbit design. They're temporary and as the constellation fills up, will become less common.
- etiam 4y ago.. at which point they'll just be shredding visual records of the sky in their regular orbits as densely as the companies have been allowed to cram in.
- shadowgovt 4y agoIt doesn't mean anything to the night sky. The night sky definitely doesn't care one way or the other.
- willidiots 4y agoI thought the same at first too, then realized this is mesmerizing beautiful *pollution*. Similar to the iridescent sheen of an oil slick on the ocean.
- shadowgovt 4y agoPollution implies harm, and there's no harm here. Contrast light pollution which makes all sky phenomena invisible. If anything, this is adding something to the existing dance of the stars and planets.
- JohnFen 4y ago> there's no harm here Define "harm". I think astronomers would disagree with your assertion.
- shadowgovt 4y agoThey already account for planes and existing satellites; we have solutions for this, they simply need refinement and deployment. (... and that's before we consider that cheap launch infrastructure means we can also address the problem by launching telescopes, which would put high-quality imagery completely unobstructed by atmosphere in the hands of far more astronomers than can touch that tech today).
- JohnFen 4y ago> we have solutions for this, they simply need refinement and deployment. As I understand it, it's not quite as simple as that when the number of satellites gets large. > that's before we consider that cheap launch infrastructure means we can also address the problem by launching telescopes The cost of the launch is not the largest part of the cost of having space telescopes.
- shadowgovt 4y ago> As I understand it, it's not quite as simple as that when the number of satellites gets large. I'm not sure "simple" is the term I'd use, but given the satellite ephemera and timestamps, the algorithm for knowing where the satellite is and therefore ignoring that chunk of sky when the satellite passes through is well-understood (and we can certainly mandate that every launching organization maintain correct and up-to-date ephemera). Telescopes observe a tiny, tiny sliver of the night sky. The density of satellites necessary to interrupt them continuously would be something well past the expected launch capacity of this century alone (and would create its own navigational problems were we to achieve it). > The cost of the launch is not the largest part of the cost of having space telescopes. Not as they've been done, because the cost of launch was so high that it could only be justified by putting a perfect-mirrored device that could see all the way back through spacetime to the first microseconds of the cosmos in orbit. Now imagine the economics when you're putting a hundred up at that price, not one (and you can use algorithms to combine signal from them to account for lower resolution). ... imagine having, with the right math, an aperture the size of the orbital diameter of the Earth itself...
- dotancohen 4y agoI watch satellites deliberately. There's about an hour after sunset, and another hour before sunrise, when most satellites are visible. Between those hours, the satellites are in the shadow of the Earth and not visible. I've observed a Starlink chain (the second full chain launched) after sunset, it was absolutely amazing _and inspiring_. I've also tried to observe a chain that I knew was overhead about midnight - and even as an experienced satellite watcher actually looking for them and knowing where they were, I could see nothing.
- shpx 4y agoYou would love pouring engine oil on a puddle. I recommend doing it when it's windy, it's more interesting when it's being pushed around.
- woudsma 4y agoI couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw a Starlink chain in the sky from my balcony in Amsterdam. We have a lot of light pollution so I was amazed to see it from the city.
- specialist 4y agoI'm more torqued about light pollution. Every creature should be able to look up at the Milky Way and wonder. (Or simply navigate. YMMV.) If astronomers are truly bent about satellites fouling their earth bound observations, they should demand SpaceX put more telescopes in orbit. Those would be better any way, right?
- rglover 4y agoIt'll be even more mesmerizing when it's sending OTA updates to your Neuralink chip to get you back to work.
- unixgoddess 4y agothis is the kind of thing that makes me happy I'll be already dead (not that it's much better now if you need to eat...)
- euroderf 4y agoI'm wondering what effect this has on isolated Amazonian and Papuan tribes.
- shadowgovt 4y agoI've never really known what to make of this concern. We plan to some day colonize the moon itself. How much should we be concerned about how it will effect isolated Amazonian and Papuan tribes when the moon is lit up with a hundred points of light on the dark-crescent side as the phases shift, and one can make out the twinkle of ion drives or torch ships crisscrossing from lunar to Earth orbits? Enough to never colonize the moon?
- euroderf 4y agoI was thinking of it more as an anthropological challenge - to investigate their changing understanding of the firmament.
- gammarator 4y agoAstronomers are not in the business of getting an emotional reaction from looking at the night sky, we're trying to learn facts about the universe by making quantitative measurements--a process that megaconstellations indisputably degrade.
- perilunar 4y agoI love astronomy but I'd personally screw over every observatory on Earth if it meant I could actually go to space in my lifetime. Honestly, do you just want to learn, or do you want to go?