Depressing actually. Future generations will look up and see shitty satellites.
That seems more than a tad hyperbolic. My wife and I enjoy sitting in our backyard next to the fire and stargazing every now and again. We'll catch maybe a dozen satellites on a good night, during the couple hours post-sunset when you can actually catch the sunlight glinting off them. By about 2 hours after sunset, the number of objects that are both high enough to still reflect sunlight and large enough to see is pretty tiny.
I see vastly more planes with blinking lights and bright landing lights than I do satellites, and this has been the case for decades, but somehow that's not a threat to our enjoyment of the night sky?
Every light adds to light pollution though and makes it more difficult for earth-based astronomy. And that's excluding events where satilites pass through observations.
Extremely annoying, but inevitable I guess.
Hopefully they will have de-orbited by then and we would have found a better solution. But then we may not have too many generations left anyway.
The Economist had an article a few months ago talking about how modern satellite fleets were so bright, they were threatening to make earth based astronomy impossible. Its title: "Goodbye, darkness, my old friend".
They probably threaten some space telescopes, too. The Starlink satellites are a little higher than Hubble. I would imagine they might take up a decent amount of field of view to Hubble, by being closer.
They are at almost the same altitude, 540 km vs 550 km. There is probably almost never a starlink sat in view for the Hubble, they would need top be right on to of each other, the satellite would pass by at a very high speed and you wouldn't see another for days.
The satellite's antenna array is huge. No wonder it's a lot brighter when seen next to a starlink satellite, which looks like a mere speck in comparison.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
seen next to a starlink sattelite
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Imagine someone putting an array of intentionally reflective mini satellites into orbit and then relocate them into mini B/W images just for fun. Or more realistically for advertisement purposes…
The fact that there are multiple persons with the capability to do this is crazy.
We've kinda done that before, the first communications satellites were just giant reflectors, made to be as bright as possible.
The Sun: Can't outshine me bitches!
Don't tempt Elon.
Finally!!
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
