On Sat, Dec 28, 2019 at 03:25:38AM -0800, Lawrence Crowell wrote: > Well largely the problem is during the early night and morning. That > is when these satellites would reflect sunlight. This would narrow > the observation time. This cuts an hour or so from observing time, > which is annoying.
I am afraid you are very optimistic. When (if?) they launch more of this garbage up, and it plagues whole sky around the Earth, you might see the problem in a wholy new light. But there will be no easy way to make it go away at this point. Even if the disruption is limited only to times like an hour after sunset and an hour before sunrise, this still means there will be problems with observing objects close to, or coming "from behind" the Sun, if I understand it correctly. >From what I read of people who make astro obs, this is beyound of annoying even with only 120 trash objects. [ https://www.geekwire.com/2019/sightings-spacexs-starlink-satellites-spark-awe-astronomical-angst/ ] QUOTE START: Hate to disagree with @elonmusk, but: that is true in wintertime, but not in summertime. Then, with altitudes at 550 km, they are visible throughout the night at middle latitudes like Europe. Just like they were last night:https://t.co/xChLDH32uk — Dr Marco Langbroek (@Marco_Langbroek) May 25, 2019 QUOTE END. Or if you would like it in picture, this one has been calculated by someone who apparently knows better than me, and it shows the number of visible trashlink sats, assuming fleet of 1600. The projection shows, for summer nights at mid lattitudes (e.g. London) there is going to be a whole nighter with intruder sats. [ https://twitter.com/cgbassa/status/1132551806125522945 ] Of course, since the business plans are already set into motion, I guess we will have to wait and see what happens. > In general with light pollution, satellites and other things > astronomy is becoming more difficult. We could of course do > everything with space telescopes, but with adaptive optics ground > based observing in the optical band with large mirrored scopes is > best. Space telescopes make the most sense for IR and UV outside the > optical band. Light poluttion is one thing, and this why there are some special locations, where there is less of this. But trashlink is also going to pollute (some) radio waves around the planet, 24/365. I am not going to speculate about beneficial effects this whole affair is going to have for "billions of poor people". I guess they have many problems, but lack of movies to watch is on the far away end of the list. I am not going to quarrel about all this, because, like I wrote above, I do not think there is much that can be done at this point. So, time will show. Nevertheless, I am always looking for more info. And I am not aware of any kind of pilot program (giving fast net to undernourished guys) which would demonstrate something to make me change my opinion. Are you? -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com ** -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/20191228212354.GA20800%40tau1.ceti.pl.
