For those of you who have never spent 8-10 hours on an evening with a eye glued to a telescope lens, looking at some of the most intricate nebulas or galaxies, let me try to give you a perspective so that you will have a smidgen of understanding why so many amateur astronomers are up in arms about these satellites.
First off, you need to understand the importance of dark adaptation. It takes about 30 minutes for the eyes to get fully dark adapted so that the rods in your eyes fully engage and allow you to see details you would otherwise miss.
Secondly, we need to talk about brightness. The big mosaic picture here is a huge widefield that is not indicative of typical astronomy. But it serves a very important yard-stick in brightness. When you look up at the sky, most stars you see are a brightness, or magnitude, of 1 to 6, with 6 being at the limit of human eyesight and without dark adaptation, most people will be be limited to about 4-5. These stars are but a fraction of a percentage of the stars out there. When you put an eyepiece on a typical ground based telescope, you can start to get down to very dim objects in the 10-14 range, which are very dim. For example, spotting the central star in the ring nebula with my 20" telescope takes extreme high power, an impeccable night and averted vision.
When looking at dim objects such as faint galaxies or nebulas, itâs a bane for an astronomer if the object is anywhere close to a star with a magnitude 1-4 star and even magnitude 5 and 6 can be problematic. This is because of the brightness these emit and when trying to view with a telescope, they can actually start to activate the cones in your eyes, effectively restarting your 30 min dark adaptation.
When your eye is glued to the eyepiece and a satellite passes through, itâs super distracting and depending upon the orientation of the solar panels, can act as a Mag 1-4 star. There are certain satellites, called Iridium, which are absolutely horrible, with flares of magnitude -9. Yes, magnitudes of negative numbers are super bright. A full moon is -13. Iâm not expecting these Starlink to ever get to that point, but I do expect that they will be in the 1-4 range, again depending upon the orientation of the solar panels.
So, astronomers have issue because of the number of satellites being proposed.
The Federal Communications Commission, a US regulator, has given SpaceX permission to launch a total of nearly 12,000 satellites to provide broadband internet worldwide. Other companies such as OneWeb and Amazon also have plans for similar fleets of satellites.
Last month, SpaceX filed documents that showed it plans to launch 30,000 additional small satellites â roughly triple the number of satellites sent into space by humans to date.
Iâve spent countless nights out with my telescopes and the thought of this many satellites boggles my mind. I have huge empathy for the professional observatories, because trying to find things like comets or asteroids is basically image comparison. Look for something that wasnât there the last time you took this picture. with so many of these satellites orbiting earth, I would imagine that this is going to make things like asteroid detection far more difficult with so many false positives.
TL/DR - It really pisses me off when people are ignoring the pleas and the warnings of established institutions and carelessly and maliciously throw out platitudes to dismiss these warnings. These uneducated people are weighing in on topics they have zero experience with and are swaying public opinion with their drivel.
Donât be uneducated. Try to understand why astronomers are concerned and maybe visit a star party some night to see why we find this hobby so enthralling.
