Image of our satellite-choked night skies
kottke.org
kottke.org
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.
Yes, terrestrial light pollution has been the number one problem since we invented electric lights, but satellites and terrestrial light pollution are both separate problems with different effects and different coverage. E.g. even though light pollution is much more harmful, you can escape it with a short drive, even if you live in a densely populated region. You can't escape the strings of satellites.
Separately: "Shortly after sunset" is a downplay. It can be hours. But in any case, it's the time when the vast majority of stargazers are looking at the stars (with their eyes).
Satellites have the same awkward sociopolitical energy infecting them as all tech does nowadays. But remember: There is absolutely nothing wrong with being upset about the effect of these satellites, just like there is absolutely nothing wrong with being upset about the effect of electric lights. You can certainly get a lot of mileage out of weighing this against the consequences of having much fewer satellites, and that's exactly where all the argument should be occupied. That they affect the night sky, which reasonably annoys many people, is just a fact.
One of my most memorable night viewings was some years ago when I was in Cyprus, lovely and warm, sat looking overhead. I saw a bright light and a dark light perhaps 2 or 3 degrees (more than a thumb, less than 3 fingers) apart travelling at the same speed. I later found out it was a Dragon carbon ship detatched from the space station and on its way back to splashdown less than an hour later in the pacific.
You have to wait a couple hours after sunset for the really good stargazing to begin…
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).
It would take 100X less effort to remove the satellites.
You're just pointing out that there are tools to automate this.
It’s ironic because stars outnumber visible satellites by a lot, so exiting out the stars is a lot more work than the satellites.
> Much of the time was spent painstakingly erasing stars, to reveal the satellites.
Many more stars than satellites in every frame. Erasing a couple satellites at most is quick. Erasing every star in the sky and keeping a couple satellites is not.
- Astronomers have automated software that anticipates each streak based on the space object catalog and automatically removes satellites from long-exposure wide field-of-view images.
- Those whose job is to track satellites and update the space object catalog have software that anticipates each star location based on star catalogs, and automatically removes stars so they can see where the satellites are.
Headline writer, a different person, used it to create misleading headlines.
There I fixed it for you. This isn't a photo in any traditional sense.
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.
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.
This is less an "image of our satellite-choked night skies" and more "a completely mendacious image produced using Photoshop".
Even if I were to be as charitable as possible to your interpretation, "mendacious" is way too strong a word, and implies an unreasonable bitterness.
The purpose of stacking hundreds of photos is to get rid of noise and unwanted trails like this.
The effort involved here is to go out of your way to do the exact opposite, specifically make sure things that are in a single exposure show up in the stack.
You stack photos to enhance clarity and remove noise. Your work is not "mendacious".
But what you are removing is still data - and as you can see, some people find it to be very interesting.
You can make data say anything by doing that.
Both can't be non-misleading right?
In this case, it seems like a desired noise was selectively amplified above signal level to portray an artificially low signal-to-noise ratio, with the article concluding "look at all this noise!"
Still a really neat picture though. Well done. I'm considering buying a print.
I also wonder if knowledge of a star map is sufficient to somehow automatically mask out the stars as the earth rotates, and let the trails show through with less effort, vs masking each trail.
The headline is the worst offender, saying that the skies are “choked” with satellites.
The headline is misleading. The photo alone is interesting with the right context.
But the framing from others is terrible. "Who gave anyone permission do this?" Um, every single satellite ever launched has gone through government approvals. Sorry if you didn't start paying attention to the world of space flight until it ruined your attempt at photography, but that's on you.
As it clearly affects the whole world there should be some kind of international body governing it IMO. But I doubt that will happen because most nations are instead racing to get similar swarms of satellites up.
This isn't some nefarious plot to manipulate the market or irradiate all the gold in Fort Knox or something. That scare-quoted "money" comes from providing useful services to people who want to pay for them. Yes, it turns out that millions of people wanting high-speed communication for their rural homes trumps people who get angry that they have to run their astrophotography through some software.
I don't understand what people actually want to happen here. Part of living on a planet with eight billion other people is dealing with the fact that some of them are going to do things you don't like. Governments, treaties, and international organizations are how we manage it. I understand if people disagree with the specific process that's in place for these things, or disagree with the decisions that get made, but they're acting like there isn't any process, or they somehow deserve to be personally consulted as part of it.
I'm not agreeing necessarily - it's honestly hard to say. There are a lot of pros and cons to convince the electorate of. But there is certainly the simple universal problem of money putting a thumb on the scale in representative governments.
I 100% agree that there's a problem of money putting a thumb on the scale. But I don't understand why that would even be relevant here. As far a I've seen (I'm not an expert but I have been following SpaceX since before they put anything into orbit) there has been no undue political influence in getting Starlink authorization to launch their constellation. We live in a system where things are permitted by default. There's no reason for the FAA or the FCC or whatever other regulatory bodies to deny it. Musk is gleefully using his money to put his thumb on the scale in other areas (spending nine figures in the recent elections is obscene) but why would he even have bothered here?
The image in the original post is not too far from what you get with an actual telescope.
The misleading part is that readers don’t see that it’s provocative art until you carefully read the details. It’s presented like documentary evidence of what the problem looks like.
The photographer might not have intended it this way, but the writers of this post took advantage of that.
The misleading part is where he edited out the stars by hand.
> Much of the time was spent painstakingly erasing stars, to reveal the satellites.
The photographer wasn’t misleading. He made a cool photo. The headline is misleading.
> Much of the time was spent painstakingly erasing stars, to reveal the satellites.
These aren’t my words. It’s what the article says!
The final image appears to have a frame of stars added for effect, but they are dots rather than arcs because they’re from a single exposure. The satellite trails are a composite of all of the images, with the stars removed.
Surely an astronomer would have software for this that would produce a more accurate picture.
It then usually gives you an image of both the combined success, and an image of just those pixels that were rejected. So, this.
So, they would erase the stars, but only to create a satellite mask, generally speaking.
If so, do Starlink and others pay rent? Should they (to ensure efficient use of the resource)?
Don't go there, it leads to nothing but more waste, abuse and corruption. If it becomes necessary there can be some form of arbitrage in how LEO is used, we're not there yet though. Maybe something like the auctions for bandwidth for mobile operators but again, where does the money go? If institutionalised it will just turn into another slush fund for whatever interests, many of them corrupt or nonsensical, to drain.
Doesn't matter. The entire point is price discovery and fair allocation. Once the resource has initially been allocated, you can allow resales, but without an auction, how would you determine the initial price?
That's how you end up with the untold amount of waste and fraud in government everywhere. It does matter where the money ends up because otherwise it will be wasted and/or swindled away.
As said we're not there yet w.r.t. the need for such measures, the interesting photo notwithstanding. There is time enough to prepare for the eventuality that such measures are needed which also gives time to define a price point based on e.g. the revenues and profits achieved by those using LEO for their operations. The same was done for bandwidth auctions - and I have no idea where that money goes - so it can be done again here if and when needed.
Of course I'd rather it go to something useful to society too, but I hope it's clear how that's a different conversation.
Makes perfect sense.
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.
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.
Of all the things to be outraged over... satellites provide extremely valuable services and are pretty near harmless. There's the pollution from the launches, some uncertain concern over putting materials into the upper atmosphere when they reenter, and that's about it. The thing people complain about most is that they get in the way of photographs of the starts. Which is annoying, but also seems to be easily worked around, and is pretty small potatoes compared to planet-wide communications. Your neighbor operating a leaf blower with a dirty two-stroke engine is harming you more than these satellites are.
Luckily most sats in LEO do have maneuvering thrusters. But the fuel is very limited and the more of them are up there the more often they have to do corrections. Eventually something will have to give.