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SpaceX satellites' effect on night sky can't be eliminated, astronomers say:
Broadband satellites being launched by SpaceX and other companies will inevitably have a negative impact on astronomers' ability to observe the night sky, according to a new report by astronomers. There are no mitigation strategies that can completely eliminate the satellites' impact on astronomical observations—other than not launching satellites at all—but the report includes recommendations for how satellite operators can minimize disruption and how observatories can adjust to the changes.
The report released this week is titled, "Impact of Satellite Constellations on Optical Astronomy and Recommendations Toward Mitigations."
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SpaceX Satellites' Effect on Night Sky Can't be Eliminated, Astronomers Say
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There's no such thing as an original sin.
-- Elvis Costello
(Score: 2) by Tokolosh on Saturday August 29 2020, @02:34PM (7 children)
If they are whining now, just wait until Musk completes his Dyson Sphere. At least all the Teslas will get charged.
(Score: 3, Troll) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 29 2020, @03:47PM (6 children)
Satellites trace predictable paths and observations can be edited to remove the satellite artifacts based on their predicted and observed paths.
As massive as the Starlink, Amazon, and whoever arrays are, they obscure less than 0.0001% of the night sky (unless you are observing on the frequencies they transmit on), and their transit times across items of interest are fractions of a second. They have gone to astounding efforts with deformable mirrors and guide star tracking to mostly eliminate atmospheric distortion, a little time-space editing to disregard satellite transit artifacts is trivial by comparison.
The astronomers who are complaining are whiny bitches, period.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2020, @05:11PM
"all they have to do"
The easiest problems in the world are those that one doesn't understand nor have to do.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2020, @06:34PM (1 child)
It is not that simple. Long exposures can't simply be switched on and off and it is not simple to subtract a time slice of the data since the exposures are of a static image. Yes they could develop some cameras and systems that do a pretty good job, but a) not sure how effective it would be or what impact it would have on quality, and b) it takes time and money to overhaul existing equipment.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 30 2020, @01:26AM
Do you math much? Mean is mean / if you're switching off pixels, stop accumulating denominator while the pixel is switched off.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2020, @09:17PM (1 child)
Yes, and we'll just fill in the obscured sections with random data. This just in: purple oblong planet discovered less than ten nanoparsecs away!
And how much of the night sky does, say, a newborn star in the Andromeda cluster occupy?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 30 2020, @01:30AM
If you are observing a distant object with a smaller than satellite radial measurement, you simply throw out those frames while the satellite is crossing.
This is many many orders of magnitude simpler than correcting atmospheric distortions, and has zero hardware requirements.
Every backyard geek with a CCD on their scope post processes more complex problems in software all the time, "professionals" who spend all their time doing observation and sharing data could develop predictive satellite tracking software among themselves, in fact, they already have for all the junk that's already up there - this is just adding more lines to the database table.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2020, @09:30PM
More cost effective and greater value to apply those edits and random data replacements into a standalone box that all the potential users of starlink(tm) can fritter away their time on. Will be of same quality and value as what the get from the internet anyway.