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from the has-this-been-thought-through? dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Skywatchers in Spain recording meteors being transformed into brilliant streaks of light by atmospheric compression are a bit miffed – as their view was rudely interrupted by a slew of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites.
Below is a short clip of what it looked like above La Palma, one of Spain’s Canary Islands last week. The meteor shower known as Alpha Monocerotids crisscrossed the sky, though it becomes hard to spot them once the satellites come flooding in.
SpaceX's table-sized Starlink birds, which sport reflective solar panels, are closer and brighter as they zip across the camera’s line of sight like machine gun bullets.
Starlink satellites during a meteor shower on Nov. 22. pic.twitter.com/wJVk1qu49E
— Patrick Treuthardt, Ph.D. (@PTreuthardt)
Denis Vida, a geophysics PhD student at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, who wrote the code to generate the footage above captured from one of the Global Meteor Network’s cameras, said the obstruction happens every day.
“Note that this was not a one time occurrence,” he told The Register. “We see this every day before dawn with about half the cameras in our network. During that time we effectively lose about half our field of view because of this.
[...] “These satellites will most definitely interfere with important astronomical observations which can have implications on predicting future meteor shower outburst. Accurate meteor shower predictions are essential for understanding the hazard they pose to spacecraft – do you see the irony? – and astronauts in orbit.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 30 2019, @12:53PM (2 children)
I'm a big fan of astronomy and also quite peeved at how little I can see inside the city now a days due to little more than light pollution.
I imagine as bright permanent lights started to become a normal thing there were also similar complaints.
Just kind of interesting to consider we're probably at another inflection point. Starlink isn't the end. It's just the beginning. In the future there will probably be tens of thousands of very low orbit satellites zipping about, everywhere. It'll make the sky quite a spectacle at night, but yeah - ground based casual astronomy will probably become a thing of the past where people reminisce back on the times we've had had, times where, nonetheless, 99.9999% of people failed to ever really take advantage of such natural beauty.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Pslytely Psycho on Saturday November 30 2019, @01:10PM (1 child)
Starlink itself is supposed to consist of 42,000 satellites. So of course at some point.
For a comparison:
So Musk intends to launch nearly 10 times more satellites than the total amount currently in orbit.
https://www.geospatialworld.net/blogs/do-you-know-how-many-satellites-earth/ [geospatialworld.net]
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Saturday November 30 2019, @01:14PM
AAARRGG!
Hit Submit instead of Preview.
"So of course at some point."
Was supposed to be corrected to "So of course competition will likely increase the total to truly incredible numbers at some point ."
Finger flub....
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.