🛰️ From ruined photos to vanishing darkness, satellites are transforming the night sky – and not always for the better.

“Look up soon after sunset, and Starlinks and other satellites are everywhere. As primarily a naked-eye stargazer and binocular astronomer, it doesn’t particularly bother me, but for astrophotographers and both visual and radio astronomers, the mega-constellation era is a tragedy. Being photobombed by satellite streaks in images is a big problem, but so is radio interference in low Earth orbit. Astrophotographers can stack images and use software to remove trails (as if post-processing wasn’t already time-consuming enough), but for astronomers, mega-constellations can hugely affect spectroscopic data and wide-field surveys, such as the Rubin Observatory.

Within a few years, there’s likely to be about 40,000 Starlinks, but with Amazon and other companies preparing rival mega-constellations, a phase of hyper-expansion is about to begin. It’s going to get a lot, lot worse. As with Iridium satellites, mega-constellations of satellites will eventually de-orbit, burn up and disappear from the night sky, though probably not en masse in our lifetimes.”

Full article from Jamie Carter for Space.com at the link below.
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