Image of Our Satellite-Choked Night Skies
94 points - today at 2:49 PM
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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.
This is less an "image of our satellite-choked night skies" and more "a completely mendacious image produced using Photoshop".
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.
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).
If so, do Starlink and others pay rent? Should they (to ensure efficient use of the resource)?
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.
Makes perfect sense.