Image of our satellite-choked night skies

Kevin_Flynn

Looks like some of the first 8-bit Moiré pattern demos. Makes perfect sense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moir%C3%A9_pattern

cperciva

The hard part came next. Larsen spent about 45 hours layering the individual photos – each of which contained about 25 satellites – over one another, using Adobe Photoshop. Much of the time was spent painstakingly erasing stars, to reveal the satellites. This is less an "image of our satellite-choked night skies" and more "a completely mendacious image produced using Photoshop".

ck2

* https://www.instagram.com/p/Dei4FQ0HSt- * https://satellitemap.space * https://platform.leolabs.space/visualization

anonymous_sorry

It looks like low earth orbit is a limited resource. Is it? If so, do Starlink and others pay rent? Should they (to ensure efficient use of the resource)?

tetraodonpuffer

it seems fairly evenly distributed besides the aggregation in the middle, what orbit would that be? why are there so many satellites there?

jefftk

A lot of people are going to look at that manually edited image, think it's a traditional long-exposure photo, and conclude that satellites are much more of a problem for astronomy than they really are. The photographer made a really neat picture, but Kottke is presenting it with a headline that suggests its something else, and generally not giving enough context (mostly just blockquotes).

safog

It is a bit ridiculous these days and it's only going to get worse with basically every major country needing to do a version of this for defence purposes. Go out tonight and just look at the sky for 5 mins and I'll guarantee you'll see a couple of satellites flying past. As with a lot of other technologies, the genie is out of the bottle and I don't think we're putting him back there again, this is the future.

totetsu

I remember when this was more of a theoretical problem :( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128726 compare when i made that comment in 2020 https://satellitemap.space/s/8Tu9xcHa with now https://satellitemap.space/s/R4YUwDQn

codingconstable

ouch more dishes than a tapas bar

adithyassekhar

I want to thank those little guys up there for google maps, internet, tv, weather, rescues, whatever else they do. Put up some more.

bradgessler

A few things: Satellites are only visible shortly after sunset and before sunrise, known as astronomical twilight. If the images in the photograph upset you and you think our night sky is ruined, the thing that kills it the most is light pollution. Flood lights, parking lights, and street lights that don’t direct light down to the ground make viewing much worse than satellites for everybody. It’s just as easy to capture incredible images of the night sky, even during astronomical twilight, with image processing. Here’s photos I’ve captured in my driveway in the SF Bay Area: https://bradgessler.github.io/observatory-blog/observations/ I captured said images with an Elixir software stack I installed on a Pi and hooked up to my telescope. It’s open-source at https://github.com/bradgessler/observatory for those who are interested. I hook Claude up to it and it runs observations for the night, processes images with deterministic tools, and publishes them as the night progresses.

arjie

This is awesome. How far we have come in the last century. How much farther we have to go. We will conquer the skies, and then the stars. I remember thinking when I was a child how exciting the future was going to be. I had a bunch of these books talking about space and ships and stuff. Well, the future lived up to billing. We got there.

waltbosz

I like seeing satellites at night. The first time I saw one was during a family trip to watch a meteor shower. As we watched for meteors, my dad pointed out a passing satellite. Then he told me a story of how in his youth, satellites were so rare and new that the local newspapers would publish when one was going to pass over the area so folks could go out and spot it. On that camping trip, I think we only noticed the one satellite. 20 years later, I can now go in my front yard and see several satellites every few minutes, and point them out to my kids, and retell the story their grandfather told me.

giantg2

Something doesn't right to me. Shouldn't the streaks vary more in their length? They all seem really similar, which given the set time of 8 seconds would mean the speed to relative distance relationship would have to be near constant for all. Some of the ones on an approaching/departing path seem to show a small variation. But are none of these on an elliptical orbit with the appogee in view? Should have a much bigger variation, I would think?

phyzix5761

This is intentional misinformation and sensationalism targeting a specific political opponent. Get out of here with this nonsense.

demo4567

We never needed this. All of that just to feed divisiveness to people. This was done without our consent. Typical of the pdfile Elon Musk

throwaway2037

Uhhh, clickbait? The opening sentence says: > To create this composite image, photographer Brendan Larsen captured almost 600 photographs over a two-hour period and then manually stitched them together. So, no human eyeballs could ever see that image.

archimedes237

I look up at the stars and I don't see anything like this image. I see stars and some plane lights.