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> the astronomical community on the other hand as far as I'm aware expected this Huh I didn't realize that. Do you have a source handy? I couldn't find it in

> the astronomical community on the other hand as far as I'm aware expected this Huh I didn't realize that. Do you have a source handy? I couldn't find it in my brief literature search.[0] I found a couple references to Starlink brightness from 2019, but they're all after the first operational launch. > https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.14152.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.14152.pdf seems to be the latest review I found on the issue, with Post-VisorSat being worse than VisorSat Yes SpaceX needed to delete the visors to add laser hardware, so they developed a novel space-rated dielectric mirror as the new mitigation method. That was their first generation mirror, with the current second-gen mirror having better optical performance. As far as I know they haven't been characterized yet. Iterative development takes time, it's true. It also takes money, which is why Starlink competitors are investing essentially zero resources in dark sky stewardship and R&D. Why bother? They know skywatchers will call anything and everything Starlink, so Bad Billionaire will soak up the blame regardless of who really caused it. The competitors are astronomy's real 'enemy at the gate,' but most folks are too distracted by the shiny Elon Musk bouble to notice. [0] for example https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=megaconstellations+brightness&as_sdt=0%2C33&as_ylo=1999&as_yhi=2019 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=megaconstellations+brig... and https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=starlink+brightness&as_sdt=0%2C33&as_ylo=1999&as_yhi=2019 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=starlink+brightness&as_...

aragilar 3y ago
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/ https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/ works much better for astronomy than google scholar, my search query was "starlink" and limited to astronomy papers. My research is theory (not directly affected), so most of my background on this has come from grumblings over beers and the occasional talk (so I'm not really in the loop). Satellites (and other forms of interference such as RFI) have always been a problem for some groups (basically, anyone with long exposures, wide exposures or working with faint sources, it all comes down to the probability of a satellite appearing in the field of view mixed with how bad that is), but it's the massive increase in numbers plus the move over the last ~10 years to looking for transients (LSST is the poster child here, but there are lots of others) that have made it a more community-wide issue. Other groups have been mentioned (I recall Amazon being mentioned), but the "focusing on Starlink" thing might be a reflection of what pop-science reports, and what's actually able to be measured being published.

aragilar 3y ago

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/ https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/ works much better for astronomy than google scholar, my search query was "starlink" and limited to astronomy papers. My research is theory (not directly affected), so most of my background on this has come from grumblings over beers and the occasional talk (so I'm not really in the loop). Satellites (and other forms of interference such as RFI) have always been a problem for some groups (basically, anyone with long exposures, wide exposures or working with faint sources, it all comes down to the probability of a satellite appearing in the field of view mixed with how bad that is), but it's the massive increase in numbers plus the move over the last ~10 years to looking for transients (LSST is the poster child here, but there are lots of others) that have made it a more community-wide issue. Other groups have been mentioned (I recall Amazon being mentioned), but the "focusing on Starlink" thing might be a reflection of what pop-science reports, and what's actually able to be measured being published.